Art with Heart with Children

Art with heart has more or less been an individual activity for me; a way to express myself and connect with strangers. But last week I was playing with my 6-year-old niece in the park when I had an idea of art with heart with her play group. They were 7 girls and while they played with each other, every 5 minutes one would come complaining to her mother. So I thought I would volunteer with these children. The idea was to engage the kids (without any complaints to mommy) and give some ‘me time’ to their mommies!

I had another idea which I didn’t want to tell their mothers when I went to ask for their permission – I wanted to introduce letter writing to the kids. Today where elders have forgotten letter writing, the kids are not even aware of what it was. I wanted each child to write a letter to her parents! And I was amazed when these turned out to be letters of gratitude and love 🙂

I looked up for some easy origami flower ideas; bought papers and other material required and prepared individual craft kit for each child on Saturday. Sunday morning, we set out on our park picnic – me and my 7 little wards for the afternoon.

Here are the steps for the flower we made: (taken from Homemade gifts made easy)

1. Cut 8 (coloured) + 1 (plain) 3 inch diameter circles for each flower. In the plain circle, make 8 sections by drawing 4 diameters.
2. Take one coloured circle and place it on the table coloured side up. Fold circle in half.
3. Fold it again in half
4. Fold down the top layer of paper as far as it will go. The fold should go through the left and right corners.
5. Your paper should now look like the picture no. 5 in figure below. Now flip the paper over and repeat the fold on the other side.
6. Partially unfold the paper until it looks like in picture no. 6 in figure below.
7. Turn the paper over and then fold each side in to meet the center line.
8. You’ve finished folding one petal of the flower. It should look like picture no 8.
9. Fold all the petals to make 8 petals for the flower.
10. Put some glue on the plain side of the pointy end of the petal
11. Glue the petal into one of the 8 segments of the plain circle.
12. Glue on the rest of the petals one by one.
13. The flower is complete:). You may put it inside a book for a few minutes to help everything glue down in place.

The girls then wrote small messages to their parents on the blank card and then stuck the flower on it. Ta da! The lovely gifts from the girls to their parents is complete but not without each posing with their gift 🙂

The mommies had sent us a lot of snacks so after our letters to parents were done we feasted on cakes and pastas and chocolate sandwiches :). After that we did a few rounds of making melodies in my heart and ended our picnic with the rain clap! Rain clap is something I recently learnt from my friend Pratyush. It was so much fun, we called in everybody else in the park also to be a part of it.

Rain Clap Energiser:

Start with rubbing your palms together. The wind is whistling.

Snap your fingers. The raindrops are starting to fall lightly.

Clap with 1 finger to the palm. The rain is just beginning to start.

Now clap with 2 fingers to the palm. The rain is slowly increasing.

Now clap with 3 fingers to the palm. The rain is increasing even more.

Now clap with 4 and 5 fingers to the palm. The rain is now in its full force!

And now the rain slowly starts to reduce (reverse the steps)

Clap with 4 fingers.

Clap with 3 fingers…

Clap with 2 fingers…

1 finger.

0 finger. The rain stops.

The next day when I went to drop my niece to the bus stop, I was amazed to see more of the flowers they had learnt on Sunday. They were taking it for their class teachers!

It was truly art with heart 🙂