A little snippet of how we planned our trip to the mountains together

A trip to the Mountains

After all the planning, adventure and fun, it was finally time to come back home.

A child's play is not simply a reproduction of what they have experienced, but a creative reworking of the impressions they have acquired." - Vygotsky Ideating, planning, organizing, questioning, reasoning and collaborating were some of the many skills that children were observed developing and building on during this engagement. Children were seen co -planning with each other to take charge of their own learning, sharing their ideas, making connections and applying their prior knowledge and experiences to extend their learning. It was heartening to see children carefully listening to each other, taking each others views into consideration and applying their problem solving skills to create a shared learning experience even in the distance mode of learning.

Step 2 - Convincing all our friends to come to the mountains with us While one of our friends happily agreed to come to Uttarakhand, convincing our other friend was quite the challenge! It really took a lot of thinking! Here were some of our ideas and this is how it went...

"Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn." - O. Fred Donaldson

A discussion on the different places in India sparked children's interest in wanting to plan their own pretend trip together. And this is how it went...

"Wait !! We need to pack our bags."

Step 4 - Making a list of things we need to pack on our trip!

"We are going to stay for 7 days there so we need 7 clothes. We need to carry snow clothes because it will be cold there" - Amaya

"I am carrying some papers with me so I can do class from there." - Vidhaan

"I am taking a water bottle and masks with me." - Varnika

The very important thing we need to take is...

The most important things I want to take are...

I am also packing money if I need to buy somethings

I will pack medicines, money and a water bottle

"We reached the mountains! Lets go to the villa now"

Step 5 - Planning what we are going to do in the mountains Now that we have reached our destination, Amaya suggested that we need to think about what all we want to do here. Here are some of our ideas...

These are the mountains I can see from my villa window!&#160;

We can climb the mountains and see some snow animals

But how are we going to go to the mountains?

Step 3 - Planning our transportation To plan how we all want to travel to the mountains, we again decided to take a vote. It was unanimously decided that we will take a plane. However, one of our friends had an important question, "But how will we go the airport?"

Maybe we can take a taxi to go to the airport?

I drew the plane and taxi we took to Uttarakhand

Now that we are all packed and our bags are ready, lets goooo!

I want to drive to the airport! Everyone sit in the car. Let's go

I am driving the plane. The table are all the things. The on button and all

I also want to drive the plane. It is far away

"I drew everyone who went to the mountains.This is Ms Lipika, 4 boys - Vidhaan, Atharva, Adyatth, Zubin and 3 girls - Nidhi, Amaya and me. We are all going to the mountains together."

Step 1 - In order to plan our trip together, the first step was to decide where we all want to go! To help us decide, we first looked at pictures of different places like Goa, Pondicherry, Delhi, Coorg, Uttarakhand, Kabini and Kerala and then took a vote to help us decide where most of us want to go.

As can be seen in the table above, we narrowed down on 3 places that we wanted to go to but Uttarakhand (the mountains) had the most number of votes. So now it was time for us to convince our two friends to come with us to Uttarakhand.