Facilitating a session and making it as interesting as possible for children to have fun in the library has become my objective. In the past few months, the attendance of the children at our Chimbel site has been dropping drastically due to various reasons such as tuitions, prayer calls, games and other activities. When the numbers go down, I worry whether I am doing something wrong or are they are getting bored of our sessions? So, after several discussions with the team, I decided to do something really different to get children interested in our sessions.
An idea popped into my head – Why not try something light and fun? Maybe some simple art or craft that would interest the children as they love art and craft sessions very much.
I confess that I am not an expert in art and craft but, I am ready to do anything which will allow children to learn and have fun. So I decided to plan for a simple Origami Craft session using newspaper and an art session on Thumb Painting. Of course, for me this was not fun. I had to prepare for this seriously and watched YouTube videos online to learn. Out of these two, the most challenging was the Origami craft. This requires lots of attention and patience. So, I practiced on my own and after much trial and error, I was finally able to learn a simple Origami newspaper vase which could be used for planting small plants.
The Thumb art session was much easier to facilitate as I had the support of some of the Thumb Art books from the library. The children loved this form of art more as they realised that to create a different form of art, all they had to do was to use their thumbs. Honestly speaking, the children were initially surprised but as the sessions went underway, they loved these new ideas and participated actively. And this was visible in the sharing of their work.
Yet, this is not the end and I have many more such ideas up my sleeve to be shared with the children as they deserve this joy and fun. They enjoyed participating in these sessions as much as I did in preparing and facilitating these sessions. I want these children to come to the library regularly and fun sessions interspersed in between our story telling sessions might just be the answer.
