How Lord Ganesha Helps Children Build Life Skills – The Write Compass Mentorship Activity

On the auspicious occasion of Ganesh Chaturthi, The Write Compass students learnt valuable lessons from Lord Ganesha.

10 lessons from Lord Ganesha

While we enjoy the festivities, it is important to understand valuable lessons we can imbibe at home, school, or the playground. These learnings are simple, practical, and will stay with the child/adult no matter the situation.

1. Stay Calm and Think Clearly
2. Use Your Wisdom
3. Be Kind and Helpful
4. Don’t Give Up (Even if the task is small!)
5. Stay Creative and Curious
6. Listen Carefully
7. Observe quietly
8. Show respect and kindness
9. Practice patience
10. Stay positive and brave

What made this activity even more special was that we tried to apply these learnings through reflective writing.

For instance, Lord Ganesha teaches us to stay calm, even when things get difficult. We pondered and wrote about how we can use this at school/home.

Lord Ganesha reminds us to think before we act and make smart choices. The children pondered: A wise choice I made today.

These may seem trivial, but we work on these life skills to equip our children to handle any situation and take ownership.

As I mentor young minds, I observe that they struggle with focus and attention. When they forget things like stationery, miss homework, or even forget a water bottle, they often blame a parent.

Taking help from Lord Ganesha

Since Lord Ganesha is a favourite amongst children, I took His help to share some life skills that will help them. Because today’s children will be tomorrow’s leaders, now is the time to instil good values, life skills, responsibility, and ownership.

How Lord Ganesha helped me teach focus

As for working on focus, well, we did this art with dots inspired by pointillism – where we used cotton earbuds, dabbed them into poster paints and coloured our Ganesh ji. To be honest, the children found it challenging because they had to patiently fill in the artwork. Some even resorted to shortcuts by using the earbuds as a paintbrush, which defeated the purpose entirely. The idea was to use three colours – yellow, green and blue, one at a time.

The children struggled. Some struggled to get their hands smeared with paint and kept asking for tissue paper. Somewhere along the way, the children forgot to enjoy the process, as they were all so outcome oriented. We have to mentor them to enjoy the learning, the journey, because sooner or later, they will reach the destination anyway!

Teaching children to follow instructions and stay calm and focused may not always work with lectures and stories; it’s more effective when they practise it themselves. In this case, using a simple technique from pointillism, which is a fantastic kinesthetic learning method, allows young minds to explore being still, calm, and following the rules, without rushing and learning to ground themselves.

Start with simple habits for bigger positive outcomes

We need to start teaching them to follow simple instructions and rules, as that is the foundation for them to follow bigger rules of life – such as following traffic rules, standing in a queue in a bank, waiting for their turn to board a flight or train. If they can’t develop patience with simpler habits or activities, how can we expect them to stay patient and calm in bigger situations? Such habits don’t happen overnight. They need to be inculcated slowly, gradually, and through simple, fun exercises followed by a reflective writing activity.

While Ganesh ji graces us with his love and blessings, may we also pray for wisdom, patience, self-worth, and self-confidence, among other things. We may or may not always have material comforts, but we’ll always have ourselves to face any challenges.

If you found our mentorship techniques intriguing, this is just one of the several techniques we use to mentor children. Whether you’re a parent, a school/college principal, or a student coordinator, if you’d like us to conduct such workshops and sessions at your institution, reach out to us at The Write Compass. We use writing, art, and craft to help young minds (and even adults) build creative self-expression, self-confidence, self-worth, and more.

We at The Write Compass look forward to collaborating with schools/ colleges/ universities/ corporates to conduct our workshops from the W.I.N.G.S and I.N.S.P.I.R.E programs – because mentorship, guidance and self-expression should always start young.

If you wish to enrol your child/student in our I.N.S.P.I.R.E Online Writing program, fill out this form, and we’ll connect with you over a video call online.

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