Connecting with kids in India…

Guest post by Year 6 students, Liat, Isabella, Rebekah and Talia. For more details, see my post ‘More similar than different…’

We spoke on Skype to kids in India!

At the beginning there were only three of them but near the end, the room gradually filled up and they were all very interested.

We found out that they love soccer, sweet food and fire-crackers. (for Diwali). We asked them what they eat and they said they eat Laddu which is made of rice powder and other things. They said they mainly eat dried food. We think this could be because they may not have fridges.

We showed them our currency and they showed us theirs, which has Mahatma Gandhi on it. They said the paper is special paper imported from Europe.

We mentioned that Liat likes singing they asked us to sing, so we sang them a song and they sang us one!  We asked them if they play musical instruments and they said they play harmonium and drums. Rebekah plays the guitar and they said they have the sitar and they want Rebekah to bring her guitar next time we speak.

Next session: Today we played two songs for them on Rebekah’s guitar and sang, which they said that they enjoyed. One even asked us how much a guitar costs. They taught us some words in Marathi, which is their home language.

REBEKAH:

I thought that this was an awe inspiring experience because when you think of Indian kids you think of starving children wearing rags, but once we got to know them we found that we were similar to each other in a lot of ways and I found myself connecting with them on a deeper level. I also found that once I had talked to them for a while I felt that my whole opinion on how they acted had changed from ‘they are sad’ to ‘they are happy’.

LIAT:

I thought it was a really interesting thing to do. I found that they had really good English when you wouldn’t think they would be able to speak to us at all. We had so many things in common like what music we like and what games we play. They all like to speak to us and they all want to tell us different things and they scream out to tell the boy who speaks the most English what to type and then he translates what we reply.

ISABELLA:

I enjoyed talking to the Indian kids, not particularly to learn our differences but mainly to discover all the similarities. Most of them can speak a lot more English than we thought and understand everything we say. What was very interesting was how they knew some of our songs and we didn’t know any of theirs. They were very positive about everything and never told us they disagreed. Talking to them was great because while knowing that we could understand each other, we still had enough differences to keep up our conversation.

TALIA:

I think it’s great that we (Australians) can talk to people in India. I find it even better that it’s led by children, because it can help us with our inquiry. It’s a good idea that we can interact with children of a different culture and find out about them in this way.