It’s not about Shreyas only. Children in that age group, have many such stories to share. The nature of drawing and the choice of words varies but the imagination is always dense. We enjoy them in the classroom or at home; share it with the parents or fellow educators & sometimes quote them in our reports, blogs & websites. For the parents, this is not unusual as it is a regular phenomenon at home.

I am in awe of such stories & often wonder how to process this further. There is a natural ability in children to pick up words heard in different situations and use them in different ways – sometimes it fits well; many a times it doesn’t. To make too much out of these is like putting pressure on their imagination and playful expressions. In spite of knowing this, I still feel the urge to share it with a language teacher or develop few activities around it. However, that hardly happens (especially, in a school set up).  In schools there is never enough time to do such things. Often when some exercise is done, to make it inter-disciplinary the visual art aspect is included either to decorate or to make some sketches in the end. It is rarely considered together and hardly included at the ideation(thinking) stage. I wish there was a possibility to instantly collaborate with a story teller or a puppeteer. I also wonder whether having a psychologist or some expert to study such intricacies in their stories would have been helpful. But that never happens.

What if a whole range of such expressions of a young learner is collected and intensely studied? For that matter, how to analyse these? Besides this, given the number of students in a class in school, it is practically impossible to record such happenings all the time. This happened in a smaller group of five students at home for a weekly art class and not a school set up. 

How to encourage such story telling/imagining/making connections? How to trace the transformation from this kind of expression to the onset of logic and rational in the learning pattern of a child? How to retain such bringing together of distinct things? Is that even required? All this remains unanswered. And the trial and to make error by the educator continues.

However, this should not stop us from enjoying such expressions by the children. These are the most precious and delightful experience for an educator teaching the same curriculum for years. I thought of writing this not only to share my unanswered questions but also with the hope of getting to know experiences of other educators & facilitators working with children.  Surely, many of them have baskets full of such stories. Hopefully, like Shreyas’s basket, theirs is also floating on a lake running from north pole to south pole