Children always fascinate
me. Most of the time when I
forget the true inborn quality of human, I just have to look at little children. They are cheerful,
full of curiosity, expressive, loud, innocence and fearless. They don’t have
much worries and fears like adults. But unfortunately, I meet many parents, out
of their ignorance, transmit their worries and fears to their kids and these
little children can start to have worries and fears as early as the age of 3.
In addition to that, it’s very
common that the society want them not to make mistakes. While making mistakes
is actually an important process to grow.
Every weekend, I teach my neighbor’s little daughter to read
and write for one and half hour. She’s six years old. She’s so timid, shy and
very quite. In our first meetings,
I needed to put extra efforts to just to communicate with her. Whenever I asked
a question, she responded by nodding or shrugging. When she found difficulties
in writing a word, she would just sit and stared at her paper blankly for a
long time. When we tried to read a word together, I could only hear her
whisper. But when I asked her to repeat after me, she would just move her lips
without any sound.
Today, before starting the lesson, I decided to ask her to do some
artsy. I know she likes to draw
using color pencils and crayons,
so this time I asked her to join me painting
with acrylic paint. Her eyes
got bigger when she saw piles of small color tubes on the floor. I could sense
her excitement. I only taught her how to mix certain colors and let her do the
rest. I let her know that she’s free to use all the brushes and paints here and
she didn’t have to worry to be messy or to create something ugly. There’s no
ugly art for me. Whenever she hesitated, she would look at me asking for
approval if her painting was okay. And I would assure her that she could paint anything on that paper. That
she’s allowed to be as creative as she could be. Then not long after she
started painting, she became talkative. She asked many questions like how to
make pink color or how to clean the brush or how to make a flower and why she
needed water to paint, etc. It was wonderful to finally see her actively into
something and to finally listen to her cute voice enthusiastically asking many
things. And it didn’t stop there. During our writing and reading lessons, she
spelled the words loudly and when she made mistakes, she laughed and repeated
with the correct ones. We really had a good time today. The hard works and
efforts got paid. And I hope she will never lose her confidence anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment