From the month of November 2019 there are two sessions at MOP Chimbel that stayed with me the most. These are a poetry session on ‘My Many Coloured Days’ by Dr. Seuss and another Read Aloud and bird watching activity based on the story of ‘Salim Mamoo and Me’ by Zai Whitaker, illustrated by Prabha Mallya. One thing that these two books have in common is ‘colour’ of feelings in the first book and of birds in the second.
My Many Coloured Days by Dr. Seuss
This book helped us understand feelings through colours. Science explains that the light that enters the eyes besides forming a visual image, also travels in the form of signals to the central brain region called the ‘hypothalamus’, responsible for the secretion of hormones which control many aspects of the body’s self-regulation, including temperature, sleep, hunger and circadian rhythms. So for example when we are exposed to sunlight in the morning (blue/ green), the hormone cortisol stimulates us and inhibits the secretion of melatonin, which is released in our bloodstream only as darkness approaches in the evening making us feel drowsy.
While science helps us explain the ‘how’, poetry allows us to express ‘what’ we feel. Even without any prior scientific knowledge, the children were able to say that a pink or orange shirt was a happy colour and that green was soothing or cool. As the book was read out to them, the children filled up a circle with each colour described in the book, as we went page by page on a journey of words and colours that held between them an experience of feeling. The colour flooded illustrations and rhyming text in this book allowed us to explore the idea of being able to know and say how we feel.
Salim Mamoo and Me by Zai Whitaker, illustrated by Prabha Mallya
Wanting to explore the outdoors with children is something we have been wanting to do for a long time. This book provided a wonderful window of opportunity at this time of the year. In an activity before the Read Aloud, children were able to identify quite a few birds that were familiar to them. It was also okay if they did not know the names of birds, after all what are books for!
Talking about birds that children could recognise was an engaging interaction with them. During the Read Aloud, the children pointed out the various birds they recognised in the story as we read about the niece of Dr. Salim Ali, who had one big problem- she got really nervous while trying to identify birds because she felt people expected her to be very knowledgeable about birds by virtue of being the niece of an expert on birds. The story reveals how she gets out of this predicament and discovers that she indeed had a keen eye for identifying birds.
Inspired by this story and equipped with a few books on we set out on our own bird watching trip as we tried to find spaces where we could locate birds. The children were quick to identify a crows nest in a tree right next to our library and went on to see a few kites, swallows and cattle egrets.