Creative Mela is an event wherein all the students of our school are invited to take part in various activities such as card making, quilling, DIY gift cards, etc. which are organized by our teachers. This event has been into practice for several years and new activities are being introduced year after year. Creative Mela extends students’ knowledge which is often limited to academics by engaging them into extracurriculars which will be beneficial in learning new skills. As a volunteer, I was required to teach a batch of students my favored activity which was card making for grade 3,4 and jewelry making for grade 5,6. I was provided with the resources to conduct my activity. 

Initially, I was very confident in making the workshop very interesting. But as students started gathering, it was becoming difficult to manage them and divide them into groups as they weren’t ready to split from their friends. However, I and my partner (Aashvi Shah G11) somehow managed to allocate them to their respective groups. Slowly, we were able to cater to the needs of students. Gradually, everybody started coming up with their ideas and began with the card-making. Since they were young, cutting was difficult for them and so we had to be proactive in switching groups to ensure that we waste less time and students get enough time to finish their cards. I personally learned how to deal with young kids and help them develop their artistic skills. It taught me how there are different ways to deal with different age groups because not many have reached their level of maturity to understand and process instructions. It was a great experience as the children were very satisfied with the new media that they explored (glitters) and had a great time making card for different occasions. 

As we got done with our first batch, we got a fair idea of how the workshop is to be conducted which made the management much easier. Also, I and my partner arranged things on different work stations making our work much easier. Choosing to work in a pair helped me because there were more people to cater to the students. In the end, I feel we were successful in my partner as well as a solo activity which was jewelry making. I enjoyed teaching the children and hopefully took back a lot of learnings from my session. One of my participants was a teacher who was not very fond of jewelry but as she explored my workshop, she got engrossed in making her very own bracelet and thanked me later for conducting such a workshop. I had a great time receiving their feedback and expect to take up such projects in the future as well.

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