Along with all the fun these kids had on their outbound trip, the kids learnt a lot of life skills. One very important being team work. They were divided into 4 groups and all through the trip they had to work in those groups. Fortunately (or unfortunately for them 😁) they were seperated from their own friends and were forced to work with others. So it was a completely mixed group with kids from the other divisions who they dint know at all.

Working with the team was obviously the most important lesson which came out from it but another thing which came out was standing up for your team mates. From the stories I had heard there were a couple of incidents where they fought with other teams because they tried to bully them or destroy their work. They learnt to stand up together as a team and defend themselves even though they were strangers to each other a few hours ago.

It brought around a sense of brotherhood, as one may call it, among the team members and all the other groups. A sense of belonging where they all came together as students of grade 4 from their school and involved in one of the most memorable trips of their lives.

Another VERY important lesson, which may I admit was of utmost importance to her, was that Hardwork pays off. This happened on the trek they went on and a handful of kids, including P, decided to trek till the hill top. Most kids decided to stay back halfway and did not go further.

She was amazed at the view and kept saying what a beautiful sight it was. She was completely in love with it and was very proud of the fact that she was among the very few kids who took the extra effort to climb till the top. She said they learnt an important lesson from that trek “Hard work pays off”.

It was important that she learns this lesson. In fact for the past couple of months I had been stressing on the same thing to her. In her last ptm, I got the same feedback from all her teachers that if she works a bit harder she can perform much better. She has the ability but needs the extra push to achieve better results.

These little things if taught from an early age can really help the child cope with the challenges they have to face as adults. I’m glad schools now a days understand this and try to incorporate these teachings in some way or the other. Eg their latest English publishing was about a literary essay. They had to read and reread a book and reflect and write an essay about what were their learnings from the book. It was awesome to see that each child was able to extract the essence of the book and present it with evidences in the form of an essay.