*By: Rashika Dass
Gift all kids the ability to identify and understand empathy, diversity, disability, and inclusion.
Ginny’s Planet is taking its diversity programs to schools, teachers, and parents to help teach our coming generation to accept themselves, embrace diversity, be ready to face challenges, and become a better friend and a leader.
Embracing the differences and learning from them is the best way to accept diversity, inculcate empathy, understand disabilities, and practice inclusion in everyday life.
Keeping this in mind, Ginny’s Planet has introduced an Educators Kit to help teachers and parents to initiate an effective and fruitful conversation with children on Diversity.
Why was the Educators’ Kit on Diversity Designed?
The team of Ginny’s Planet have observed how children’s behaviours and attitudes develop with influence from thier peers, role models, and messages that they receive at school. Ginny’s Planet team reviewed how parents and teachers try different ways to inculcate the sense of ‘it’s okay to be different’ in kids.
In this process, guardians, parents, teachers usually have found themselves in a conundrum. A conundrum of whether they are able to teach their children about embracing the differences while getting future-ready.
Parents in today’s changing and dynamic world are worried by the thought of how will their child deal with the change? How will they evolve as ‘thinking beings’ who examine each new information with an open mind as well as a critical mindset? Will they be able to take decisions to protect themselves? How will they be able to accept failures, learn and grow from it? Parents are constantly thinking about how their children will evolve.
So many unanswered questions and each question brings tons of doubts and ambiguity.
This educator’s kit is the solution to that conundrum. It helps teachers, guardians, and parents to be able to initiate the conversation on diversity with the children of upto 10 years of age and trigger a thinking process that pushes boundaries for inclusion, in a fun way.
What does the Educator’s Kit Include?
The Kit has been designed by a group of experts, after doing some extensive interviews with parents and teachers. The designers of the kit are researchers, doctorates and practitioners trying to help teachers and parents to get children ready for the diversity accepting world.
The team brainstormed and worked through several ideas on how to create a kit that can help our teachers and parents to guide our future leaders and makers to accept the phrase ‘ It’s okay to Be Different’, to have an open perspective to everything, to be able to think clearly, to pause, to raise questions, and be aware of nauances of inclusion and exclusion.
The kit consists of a bundle of products that can assist in instigating conversation, activating thought-process of children to think differently, to accept change and to be adjustable to situations.
Triggering the thought process can be as simple as asking a question to children as ‘Do you think a bird can sit with you in your classroom?’ or ‘Can a bird come to your class and study?’ Or ‘Would you welcome the bird to your classroom?’
Simple questions like this can have different answers from different kids.
Since parents and teachers have such a difficult time on how to start imparting knowledge to children is why Ginny’s Team created this marvelous kit.
One of the products in the kit is ‘May I join the class today? – by Poulomi’. This is to help parents and teachers to open children’s perspectives. The kit also consists of a Ginny & other puppets that helps kids enact the story together with peers, parents, or teachers. This product was added to the kit as they have witnessed guardians having a successful interaction with children to understand diversity, in a well crafted manner.
Ginny’s Planet team has also created videos to help guardians to explore the conversations on diversity and disability.
The kit will also have finger puppets for meaningful storytelling sessions with children. The kit encloses two types of finger puppets: paper puppets from a DIY kit that includes printable template sheets ; and ready to use cloth finger puppets.
With the puppets, you will also notice a colouring book: Color Ginny’s World. The significance of this colouring book is that it’s designed in a way for children to enjoy colour along with developing an understanding of diversity, disability, and how to accept these as a part of humanity.
This book encourages children to think differently. It encourages you to break the obvious and add any colour to any section of the image. This activity is just for children to find out possibilities and understand that the world is what you make of it.
It’s built in a way for children to access or unlock their curiosity. With heavy and constant competition, some children tend to shut down or corner themselves. This book will help them to see things as their curious mind thinks and help them open up and accept situations.
About Ginny’s Planet:
Ginny’s Planet is a social enterprise Co-founded by Dr. Shweta Verma in 2019. The brand runs on the core value of helping our teachers and parents to teach their children to become independent, smart and better leaders by equipping them with a deep understanding of empathy, diversity, disability and inclusion. Dr. Shweta and team work on building events, workshops and products to help guardians to trigger kids’ mindset and develop flexibility to situations. They work with schools to organise workshops for children.
www.ginnysplanet.com
Ginnys planet is Enlighting my knowledge