NEW DELHI: To help children develop emotional intelligence and promote sustainable development, a life skills teacher’s unique initiative — Pandora of Emotions—is trying to break the monotonous indoor inactivity and excess screen time during the lockdown.
Co-founded by Swetcha Pershad, Nidhi Bawa and Rosy Katyal, the programme is an half an hour online engagement session with children where they are given tasks to perform using their hands intead of a mobile gadget.
“People are keen to learn, especially the children so, parents are happy to enroll 8 to 10 year olds for such activities. With school classes also being conducted online now, most parents want to draw the kids away from screens and want to inculcate a holistic approach to learning during these times,” Prasad told this newspaper.
According to Pershad, the purpose of the programme is to connect with the children and listen to their needs. "An emotional quotient in children is an important life skill, but we are only focused on academic activities. Hence, we also have activities planned for parents and children to take part in together," she added.
“Mostly, the activities are thinking based for children to use their minds to engage. The few other activities are paper-based but we work with whatever material is available easily. The idea is to help them understand their thoughts, emotions , rationalise and act,” she explained.
Other activities also include anger management which, Pershad says, have been most popular among the children along with confidence and self esteem building exercised and story based activities.
As of now, only children from private schools have been engaged but Pershad has been trying to reach out to NGOs and government schools with whom she has worked previously but the lack of electronic gadgets is an issue for those children. Pershad is also planning on doing environment-based exercises on the upcoming Earth Day on April 22 with those children. Pershad, a housewife from Chandini Chowk, became a life coach working with primary school students in 2018.
Engaging kids
The purpose of the Pandora of Emotions initiative is to help children understand their thoughts and emotions to help them rationalise and act.