Children Here and Now meets CHIKOO House

• Here comes a short report from Chikoo House Since late October to end of March Chikoo House has hosted Children Here and Now every Monday. Chikoo House is a not for profit community house with friends and friends of friends living together, and other friends and friends of friends coming to visit, do work shops, yoga, painting and much more. The house has no dogma except peace, love, happiness and non-violence. The philosophy and culture of Chikoo House has been the basis of the education offered to the children from Children Here and Now. The background for the Chikoo House hosting Children Here and Now is that the son of the owner of the house, Ravi Rinke-Øysteinson, is one of the kids at Children Here and Now. Ravis father, Øystein, and his mother, Heliane, have shared the responsibility for the Mondays at Chikoo House. The read thread throughout the season has been the "Kids Cafe" where the children have helped decide the menu, make the food, take orders and serve the clients, which mainly has consisted of the parents when picking up the kids from school. Additional other friends of the Children Here and Now + Chikoo House have also attended the cafe on a regular basis. The "Kids Cafe" is a symbol of the philosophy of education in Chikoo House. It is fun and it is integrating a lot of different challenges and subjects in to one practical task; as for example, entrepreneurship (how to run a business), mathematics (prices, costs, profit, receiving payments, giving back change), developing a natural relationship with money (tool for exchange of energy), team work and responsibility (who is the cashier, who writes the menu on the board, who takes which orders, what happens if a client´s order is ready for delivery at the same time as the child responsible for this order is busy taking another order etc.) Chikoo House has put an emphasis on all the kids taking part in the formal education offered, and accordingly the kids have been offered a lot of time for free play. We are aware that this may be a somewhat different policy than at «the land». However, we believe it is healthy for the kids to get exposed to different systems, as this is the same in the society at large. Our aim for valuing that all children take part in the sessions is to develop the ability of working and sharing together, with individual adjustments for each child, if necessary. We have usually had one session of reading and writing every Monday, usually integrated in some kind of a «near life» project as for example writing down all the the names of the trees in the garden and so forth. We have drawn on the resources available in our community at Chikoo House, and most importantly we have drawn on "Gurukula One-World Academy" which is the name attached to the educational work of residential baba in Chikoo House, Vinaya Chaitanya, and his friend Jah Muna Jungle-Baba. Vinaya and Jungle-Baba have been doing Tai Chi, meditation, clay-work, visiting temples and much more with the kids.

Would BE great to be able to add some photos to this Doc, but it does not work....so DIVE through our Photoalbum and enJOY the BABAS of the ONE World Academy in Mission