Children live in a beautiful world where imagination knows no boundaries.
They are born creative. Their natural curiosity and interest in the world around them make them eager learners. They learn about the world around them by using their senses. While they play, they see, hear, touch and move, taste and smell. All of these form the basis for the development of concepts. The stimuli through the senses keep them busy thinking, figuring things out, solving problems and being creative and spontaneous in their solutions.

Making Sense of the Senses:
* See (Visual): Visual impressions are a valuable source of learning for young children. They learn to experience and name the different colours, shapes, sizes and patterns that they see. They also begin to discriminate between various sights, sounds and other sensory experiences. Learning to discriminate shapes and patterns in an essential preparation for learning to read or write.
* Hear (Auditory): Children discover many sounds on their own as they explore new materials. Sounds and interest in sounds are important, and the capacity to listen and discriminate sounds contributes to the development of speech. They must be given the experience to listen to real life sounds —- ticking of a clock, chirping of birds, sounds of aeroplanes, etc
* Touch (Tactile): Children respond to the feel of things and learn to develop adequate understanding of the world around them.
* Taste (Gustatory): Children can identify good and bad taste. Encouragement to identify different tastes and to use appropriate terms such as sweet, sour, bitter salty, etc is necessary in the food they eat everyday.
* Smell (Olfactory): There are many kinds of pleasant and unpleasant smells in the immediate environment —— smell of food, flowers, soaps, agarbattis, etc. Describing smells increases children’s ability to express their perceptions and to describe their experiences.
* Moving and Doing (Kinesthetic and Manipulative): The sense of bodily movement is also one of the senses that form the experience on which children’s learning is based. Equally important for fine motor development is “doing” things with hands and fingers, manipulating various materials and objects.
Unstructured play, structured activities and exploration with a variety of objects and sensations are important in the early development of sensory motor skills. Children learn by interacting with concrete or real objects, and those people who are part of the environment. Whenever appropriate, children should be exposed to activity that utilizes more than one sense organ.

Stimulating the Senses
* Children learn a great deal by imi- -tation, so it is good to play games where children are asked to do ex- -actly what is being shown.
* Encourage children to use and un- -derstand ‘describing’ words by feeling objects like a hairbrush, a pine cone, a pebble, a sponge a sieve, a feather, a shell and the like.
* Teach children how to follow spo- -ken directions, like ‘walk towards the door’, ‘go up the stairs,’ ‘look under the bed’, etc.
* Help children understand and ex- -press their emotions

Dr. Gayatri Bezboruah is Associate Professor of Paediatrics, Guwahati Medical College. She can be reached at drgbezboruah@sify.com or
melange.sentinel@rediffmail.com.

Who’s Afraid of Sexuality?
Eliza Parija
She is considered the Judith Butler and Virginia Woolf of contemporary Oriya literature. And yet for her, feminism is not just about battling male hegemony. For Dr Sarojini Sahoo, an award winning Oriya writer, refutes the limits that patriarchy places on female sexual expression and identifies women’s sexual liberation as the real motive behind the women’s movement.
Most of Sahoo’s works candidly probe sensitive topics such as sexual attraction, physical desire, lesbian relationships, rape, abortion, infertility and menopause from a female perspective. “These subjects are not usually discussed in Indian literature by women, but I write on them to begin a discussion on female sexuality and help bring about change,” says Sahoo.
Sahoo has a very illustrious literary career career. She is the first Oriya writer to have a novel translated and published from Bangladesh. ‘Gambhiri Ghara’ (The Dark Abode) was a bestseller in Bangladesh when it was published under the title ‘Mithya Gerosthali’. She has published nine anthologies of short stories and seven novels. Her stories have been translated into Bengali, English and French. She is also perhaps the only Oriya woman writer to have dealt with lesbian sex in her story, ‘Nepathya’. Sahoo has been conferred with the Orissa Sahitya Academy Award in 1993, and the Jhankar Award in 1992.
The celebrated writer believes that sexuality in literature grew with feminism. And as a feminist, she discovered that for women sexuality is as essential as financial independence. During the 1980s, after her marriage, she wrote ‘Rape’, where her protagonist was a woman who dreamt about having sex with someone she did not know very well. However it was the writings of Butler and Woolf and Radclyffe Hall’s ‘The Well of Loneliness’ that compelled her to think about sexuality and feminism. But she emphasises that her sense of “eastern feminism” is quite different from the one perpetrated by western feminists. According to Sahoo, while in the West, feminism is an ideology, which has a “negative and restrictive view of sexuality and an anti-male bias,” in India, feminism is more in relation to recognizing a woman’s equal status in all respects.
However, Sahoo has not received similar support from society at large. Her work has invited severe criticism from detractors. “It is risky for a woman writer to deal with these themes, yet someone has to bear this risk of accurately portraying women’s feelings —- the intricate mental agony and complexity which a man can never feel.”
Writing on the sexuality of the Indian women and advocating women’s rights are what give this writer the greatest satisfaction. But like a true free sprit, she refuses to be restricted by labels. “I think it’s more important to be a complete human being than a writer or a feminist. But I also realise the reciprocal nature of living and writing. I believe that living gives you material for writing while writing helps you to interpret your existence in a meaningful way. I live, I write, I grow.” (Women’s Feature Services)