Follow A Child

After teaching lovely 4 ½ year-old twins Carrie and Carmen to paint a colourful plate of fruits in this afternoon’s Oil Painting for Kids Workshop, I’m finally done with my children’s art classes. I’ve taught a total of 7 types of courses, 23 workshops, and met 97 little individuals between the ages of 4 ½ to 13 years old, all in these 3 weeks of their June break.

More important than the pretty decent sum this short freelance teaching stint has brought me, it has also opened my eyes to the wonderful and colourful world that I’ve forgotten since I grew up and entered the adult world at some mysterious point in the forgotten past. The world of imagination (flowers throw parties and fall in love, dinosaurs taller than trees, fishes that eat other fishes bigger than themselves and sink to the bottom of the sea), of colour (reds, yellows, blues, greens, purples, browns, orange – their appetites and natural sense for colours is amazing, constantly bugging me to help them to mix or get more colours to create their fabulously explosively colourful clay models and paintings :). In this world, even dung has colour!), the world of peace and love and unconditional friendships (the most popular themes that appear – I love mummy, God loves us, To my best friend Kimberly etc). Their boundless energy and unrestrained laughter was infectious (for a while, I found myself running from place to place just like them! kids don’t walk – really). I learnt as much, if not more, from them as they did, hopefully, from me. Above all, they were honest. In everything, they either loved it or hated it and had no qualms about being brutally frank in showing their feelings. To gain their trust, respect and affection was more rewarding than anything I’ve ever experienced.

Incidentally, read something that would really captured how I feel, in SARK’s book Inspiration Sandwich. She wrote: A child’s world is made of spirit and miracles. We sometimes think that children should follow us, listen to us, become like us. Follow a child closely for an hour. Not to teach or to discipline, but to learn, and to laugh.