Things Falling Back in Place

Today was one of the more successful classes of this season. It took some time to get the teachers back with Karthik being a new addition to the SMK group. Last few weeks it seemed the students had lost interest and so had we. I wasn't happy with their as well as our effort. However, today's class, I think got us all back on track.

Today's class was focused on revision of last year's lessons and students did exceedingly well. Some calculation exercises threw an unlikely star in Latha who had been quiet all through last season. She can do complex additions in her head which are really impressive for her age. We did BODMAS this class and I think it will take one more class to get the point across really well.

The impact of the art class is palpable and every class you can see some new drawings in their notebooks.

Story telling as we decided is going to be a big focus of this year. One thing I have been struggling with is their tendency to rote learn. No matter how hard we try, they like to learn stuff by heart before talking about it. We have distributed a bunch of story books to the class and I think they are using them well. What disappointed me was the fact that some of them wrote the stories down in their notebook and are planning to learn them by heart :(. I think that would be our number 1 challenge.

Few teachers requested us to extend our services to more classes and were very happy with what we have been doing. It gives us great pleasure that, not only they let us teach there, they are also happy with our work. We are planning to visit one more class next week and see if we need to get more volunteers for it.

As an aside, Varlakshmi turned 12 last week and she was nice enough to keep chocolates for me since I was out of action last week.