The members of LitClub Nepal got together for another session on Monday. I was very happy because some new girls have joined the club, and I was very excited to meet them. As always, we started the program by greeting one another with smiles and then we sang ‘The Hello Song’. The new girls seemed astonished by the way we learned things at LitClub. We started off by answering the check-in question, ‘Which was the moment when you felt proud this week?’ One of the girls wrote that she felt proud while helping her 89-year-old granny at home, which was very touching. We all appreciated her with a round of applause.
We then moved on to a community building activity. For this part of the program, we planned to do an activity called the hand circle. I carefully explained the directions of how to carry out this activity. The girls were very excited to sketch their hands on the paper and decorate it with the color that explained their feelings. After that, the girls wrote down one word that summarized the type of world they want to live in inside their respective ‘hands’. This community building activity proved to be a hit. The girls used their imagination and creativity to draw this picture of hands holding each other. This carried a very important message that they wanted to give to other people in this world.
After the girls drew the hand circle, we moved to the read aloud activity where we read the poem ‘A Bird came down the Walk’ by Emily Dickinson. The girls found the poem a little bit challenging, so after the read aloud, we had a group discussion on the poem’s meaning. Even though the poem was a little difficult for the girls to understand, they enjoyed how nicely the poet, Emily Dickinson, described the bird and its movements. It was encouraging to see them enthusiastically putting forward their thoughts and opinions about the poem.
We then did another community building activity where we learned how to make a personal journal. The girls collaborated and helped one another to make and decorate their journals. Bineeta, one of the girls of the club, who is also a very good artist, had wonderful ideas about decorating the journal. She was a great help to me as well as to all of the other girls doing this activity. At the end of this session, all of us sat down in a circle, praised each other for the wonderful work we had done on that meeting, and then sang ‘The Farewell Song’ with great rejoice.
We met some new friends, we learned some new things, and we had fun doing it. Our meeting was a huge success.
-- Surabhi Sharma, LitClub Leader Nepal