Q1.
You have created a set of wonderful materials. Display your mats, stitched cloth pieces and leaf cutlery. Add name tags and short notes explaining how you made them. Invite other classmates or your parents to visit.
Answer
An exhibition is not only a display. It is a way of telling other people how a thing was made. So the name tag and the short note matter as much as the object itself.
How to hold the exhibition:
- Fix a day and a place — a corner of the classroom, or two desks pushed together, or the verandah.
- Collect everything the class made: the paper mats from Activity 1, the cotton thread wound on pencils from Activity 3, the leaf plates and donas from Activity 5, and the stitched cloth pieces from Activity 8.
- Group them by what they teach — a Weaving corner, a Thread corner, a Stitching corner, a Leaf craft corner.
- Write a name tag for every object: the name of the object, who made it, and what it is made of.
- Write a short note for each corner saying how the things there were made, in four or five lines.
- Make an invitation card and give it to the other classes and to your parents.
- Decide who will stand at each corner and explain. Take turns, so everybody gets to see the rest of the exhibition too.
- Keep a notebook at the door where visitors can write one line about what they liked.
Sample name tag and note:
| On the tag | What we wrote |
|---|---|
| Name of the object | Woven paper mat |
| Made by | Meena and Arjun, Class 5-B |
| Made from | Six blue paper strips and six yellow paper strips |
| How we made it | We taped the blue strips at the top so they could not move. Then we passed each yellow strip over one blue strip and under the next, all the way across. Every new strip started the opposite way to the one above it. That is how the checked pattern came. Nothing is glued — the strips hold each other. |
| What we learnt | Cloth is made in exactly the same way, only with threads instead of paper. |
Why the explaining is the important part: Anybody can look at a mat. Only the person who made it can say why the strips do not fall apart. When you explain your work to a visitor, you find out how much you have really understood — and that is the true test of the whole chapter.
A good idea: invite a local weaver, a tailor or a basket maker to your exhibition. Ask them to bring one tool and show how it is used. Their work is the grown-up form of everything you have made this week, and they will have things to tell you that no book contains.