Someone in an Upper Nursery class was using her fingers to dab colours on a white sheet of paper. “This is so much fun,” she told the teacher.

The person was not a four-year-old but a 30-year-old, visiting her daughter’s school.

“So, henceforth you will allow your child to paint and make a mess without getting too worried about the furniture?” the teacher quipped.

South City International School invited parents of children up to Class II to spend a day in school, attending classes and activities that their kids do around the year.

The idea is to help parents be in sync with what and how children are taught in school and to teach them to be more empathetic and understanding towards all children, said principal Satabdi Bhattacharjee.

“Often, it is parents who interfere among children and create differences. Children have to learn to adjust with other children and that can happen better if parents do not interfere,” said Bhattacharjee.

“When parents came, I told them they should sit down and interact with parents they are not familiar with. It will help them to understand other people’s challenges,” said Bhattacharjee.

The parent and the teacher are co-parenting the child and such parent-partnership programmes help the teachers to bond with parents and create a bridge, said Bhattacharjee.

About 200 parents turned up on May 4 morning for what the school called, “The room where it happens”.

The enthusiastic lot went from one classroom to another in a queue and without making any noise.

Their mobile phones had to be submitted to the class teacher and no requests for early dispersal were entertained.

From literacy and numeracy classes to sports and music, the parents were made to attend all of them.

“We had prepared a timetable and after each period, parents went for the next class or the teacher changed,” said Sejal Arora, the foundational years head, at the school.

In a literacy class, in Kindergarten, a teacher taught them letters phonetically and the parents were asked to name the words with sounds.

“If parents understand how we teach in school they will follow the same method at home instead of through a new methodology, which could be confusing for the child,” said a teacher.

A father wanted a “smiley” with a glitter pen drawn on his hand because he had finished his classwork on time.

“My daughter said I should come back with a glitter smiley,” the father told the teacher.