Kings and Kingdoms! I thought excitedly, a volley of ideas swimming through my head as I tried to chalk out the flow of activities for my forthcoming class session with 4 year olds. My job as a teacher gives me ample exposure to come up with ideas to make lessons most interesting for the little ones for I teach the age group of 3 to 5 year olds. Little did I realize that over time I wasn’t the only influencing factor in the class, but was learning a lot from them too. Some of the interactions with the kids over time also made for amusing anecdotes that I felt simply had to be penned.
Since of my kids still lived in a fantasy world of kings, still thinking that they existed only in books and that they almost were magical, I thought it would be better to give them a more realistic view about kings how they lived.
My sessions was scheduled thus –
Starting with the story of the emperor’s new clothes – wherein this clothes obsessed king who wanted a new dress everyday gets fooled by his tailors into walking naked in the streets thinking he was wearing a new invisible dress. The tailors had played a trick on the king saying that it was the most desirable outfit that can be seen only by wise men and had pretended to dress him up with the invisible dress when the king actually had nothing on him. Little did the king realize he was naked as a new born baby as he paraded the streets, telling people that he was wearing an invisible dress and was ridiculed by all and suffered shame and humiliation.
This was followed by movies and clips of the kings in India, the palaces they lived in. Then we went about trying to create little puppets of kings and kingdoms out of clay.
Duly satisfied by the exposure provided with the original objective, I called all the kids for a reflection round of all the activities – a time when we were to pour out our learning’s for the day.
“So,” I asked, “What qualities do you think a king should have?”
“A king” declared an eager 4 year old, “must wear clothes all the time.”
“And even if he doesn’t” quipped another, he must not lie about it.
That’s wisdom for you – as basic as it can get.
Vidya.S
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