I took the scrabble tiles with me on my Thursday visit to the Chimbel Community Library.
Such joy to see Faizal come up to help unload the van and Deepak and Aftab playing cricket assuring me they will come to the library, lest I ask .
We went into the room that seems to shrink on every visit, but no sooner Melcom sets the stuff done and pulls out the register, the energy of the children make the room expand. Size really does not matter when everyone in the picture wants to be there.
We did some reading and some writing and we chatted some and I caught up on the lives of some of the new children and like the proverbial magician, drew on my bag of tricks to introduce the game.
“A letter game”, declared Faizal. “This will work because everyone comes to the library to learn letters”.
I had planned to use the tiles without the board as I felt it would be simpler. We began and had a really nice time making letters and fitting them together. But in the beginning, it was not so simple. I was struck by how certain words are closely attached to certain letters and so Kashish was struggling to make tiger without any of the letters, except t ! Soon she understood she needed the letter tiles and we had yak – bear – cart and many more from our word building team.
It was a good day at the Library, we immersed ourselves in making sense of words and reading and shared ideas and it was all good !