Gyan Deepak

Gyan Deepak is a registered NGO that helps provide after-school support to underprivileged children. In our first-ever project, we had the wonderful opportunity to meet and conduct workshops with the students at Gyan Deepak. A breath of fresh air, the children of grades 3 and 4 of the NGO, were eager to both learn and share. Shy at first, they opened up to us like a flower in full bloom and had the most vivid ideas and stories to narrate.

We started the 1-hour session by introducing ourselves and familiarising ourselves with the group. Active little hands rose continuously with zest throughout the exercises and games and the excitement to learn gave us motivation as well. In the first course- story writing, the children were taught concepts of different constituents of a story such as plot, dialogue, climax, character, etc. They learnt new words such as "livid" and "determined" and even made good use of them in their sentences. We will not be surprised if they will be "determined" to use these words in the future. Towards the second half, the team at Project Sonder worked with the children to build a story. Brains were put to the test, vocabulary was expanded and characters such as a lazy thief and a wild dog evolved out of thin air. We are grateful to the team at Gyan Deepak for this unique opportunity and we are proud to say that a new relationship has been formed and a new story(pun intended) has been created.

Sometimes when words fail to connect us, pictures most certainly do. A picture does speak those thousand missing words. On Day 2, we embarked on an artistic journey, working to give the stories we created a picture. Children had their pick of mediums - watercolour, colour pencil, pencil shading. After receiving a brief introduction about the three art mediums, they were divided into two groups. One group skilfully portrayed a dog kennel and its residents through water-colour. Strokes of brushes and smiles were the highlight. On the other hand, group 2 decided to enhance their colouring skills and chose a more scenic setting. They sketched and coloured, sometimes even outside the borders as one should! Laughter occurred alongside conversations. Having met the vivacious children, we are proud to say that our time at Gyaan Deepak was well spent.