Magic Show with Juergen on Christmas-Eve!
| German volunteer Oscar invite Magic-man Juergen to perform a show for the Thamarai students and community. It was a non stop extravaganza of magic with the audience laughing throughout and excited to find out how Juergen created the tricks. The finale was exciting as Juergen showed us how the final trick worked! The show was followed by our 10th standard student Illambaruthi appearing as Santa Claus with his 7 helpers to distribute gifts, cake and dance to Jingle bells. |
Trip to the Botanical garden for over night stay!
Sathyamoorthi kindly arranged for our students and facilitators to have an ecological program at Auroville Botanic Gardens. It was a 2 day program with a camp fire and sleep over. We enjoyed the gardens, wild life, ecology lessons, the sunrise walk, watch out tower and bird watching. We also used the time to do some further leadership training with Brian, craft making, body movement with Carla and a social emotional learning session with Raam.
A big thank you to all the Botanic Gardens team for their generosity and dedicated work.
Matrimandir and Mothers garden:
| It is always special to have access to Matrimandir on children’s day (Tuesdays). This time, we had a touching talk by Muthukumari, visited the inner chamber and petals and spent time relaxing in the gardens. Students reported feeling stillness, calm, catching space between sounds and feeling grounded and connected to the earth as we lay in savasana on the grass in deep relaxation. It was followed by a visit to Mother’s garden where we admired the multitude of colours and scents and came home with wild flower seeds for our garden 😉 |
Jewellery-making sessions!
| Wonderful new volunteers joined in this camp -Magalie, Naifa and Gunavathi- to share their craft skills with students. Magalie taught us knitting and bracelet making, from Naifa we learned beautiful paper crafts and Gunavathi taught us how to make flowers and home decorative crafts. All the children eagerly participated and they really enjoyed themselves and requested to continue, so we will program these as part of the new year weekend activities. |
Treasure hunt with Oskar!
| “I started to prepare for the treasure hunt and tried to include points like cleaning and including village people for the game, like the local shopkeeper. In between the treasure there were hints and activities, like cleaning up an area and then find the next hint. Within the first 20 mins, students had cleaned the sports area and reached the next hint. I included all ages of children, younger ones had to play a game and older students needed to solve a mathematics problem. The math’s looked challenging but I guided them with a method to easily solve the problem, they got it and feedback to me “oh we thought it’s very difficult but using the method it’s not that difficult”. Communication with the facilitators worked well, we had discussed how to hide the final treasure on the terrace and hid it under the yoga mats so it was challenging and took students 10 minutes to get the treasure. This was the first time we created a treasure hunt in Thamarai so we learned lots including how much pre planning is needed, time management and making sure that other activities are not happening at the same time. |