Besides gorging on ice cream and making regular trips to the neighbourhood pool to cool off, here are a few ways to make the long days of summer vacation interesting for your child. In this concluding part of the series on summer activities for children, we look at what Delhi has to offer.
Play time: (top) At the Katkatha workshops, children will make puppets and also put up a puppet show; and playing chess regularly helps children concentrate better at math. Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint
Be a creative cook
Get your child some basic training as a chef by enrolling him or her at Choka La’s chocolate, cookie and cupcake classes. The sessions start with an audio-visual presentation on the history of chocolates, following which each child is allotted an individual workstation complete with ingredients, chef’s cap and apron. The children learn everything about making chocolates—melting, adding flavours, decorating and packaging; they also experiment with cupcakes and cookies, including preparing the dough from scratch. At the end of the session, the children get to take home whatever they have made, along with recipes, the chef’s hat and apron.
“Making chocolates in shapes of alphabets was great fun,” says Aryaman Trehan, 10, who attended the workshop last year. “Even though I had the recipes, I could not make the chocolates at home later because ingredients are tough to find,” he adds. To deal with this problem, Choko La will put together a takeaway kit with ingredients and cookie cutters (approximately Rs500).
Call: 011-41669595/41757570
Age group: 4-18 years
When:Workshops start in the first week of May
Charges: Rs1,800 for a two-day workshop (3 hours daily), Rs2,100 for the three-day workshop
• TIP: Buy cookie cutters, Rs200 for six pieces at Sham di Hatti, Khan Market, New Delhi.
Have fun with fins
Did you know that pairing a stonefish with a goldfish in a tank is a bad idea because the stonefish will gobble up the poor goldfish? This summer, let your children take the lead at the National Science Centre’s aquarium-building workshop and learn more about fishes. Dinesh Malik, the coordinator of the workshop, says children are usually interested in keeping fishes as pets, but don’t know how to take care of them. In this five-day workshop children will be taught, among other things, how to make and maintain an aquarium, choose the right fish, decorate the tank and select the food. At the end of the workshop, the children get to take home their own custom-decorated aquariums (2ft x 1ft x 15 inches) with four fishes.
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The National Science Centre, near Pragati Maidan, is also organizing several summer workshops for children in different age groups on toy-making, mathematical origami, astronomy and electronics at home.
Call: 011-23371893/23371945
Age group: 11-13 years
When: 18 May onwards (four aquarium-building workshops of five days each)