Session 2009-2010 Ends

Today was the last class of this session. It just had a quick revision of pronouns (for 6th) which I hope they won't forget all through their lives. Exchanged contact details with my first class (7th standard) and some parting advice. Some of them are moving to better schools, others not. I have identified one person to be included in sponsor a child program. Let's see how it goes.

I also got a pleasant surprise of receiving two gifts, one from a student and other from the school. And also, signed a few autographs for people :)

I hope at least some of these students do very well in their lives. Let's see where they are after a decade from now.

Leave of Absence

Fellow SMK volunteers,

I am out of town for a week which incidentally includes two weekends, one on each side of the week :). So, I will not be able to come for classes. Hopefully, I will be back in action on 27th Feb.

Meanwhile, Dale and Amit are going to make sure (a little pressure tactic here) that SMK takes part in the Environmental Awareness Painting competition and WINS. Looking at their paintings last week, I think they are sure to win. If they don't I am going to put it on you two ;)

A little non serious post with uncharacteristic presence of smileys. I think, just the whiff of vacation is enough to have this effect on people. Good luck then.

Re: Fresh Blood in the system

So, we have yet another new volunteer for SMK. At this rate I think we will soon be running a 'fresh blood' bank ;)

Please welcome the latest addition to SMK family - Dale, who was the driving force behind the painting competition that I talked about in my previous entry. We wish her a long and exciting tenure with SMK.

Run up to Painting Competition

YFS is organizing a Bangalore wide painting competition to generate environmental awareness. The idea is to select 5 students from each school and have them participate in an event where all the schools come together. At SMK, we selected a group of 20 students from 5th, 6th and 7th standard and held a drawing competition. The best five will be sent for the final competition. Here is a glimpse of it.

SMK Private School | Jan 23, 2010

Had a small lecture for my previous class. They managed to remember some stuff that I taught but not a lot. Also, they will be moving out of the school after this year. I am planning to take two "gyan" classes for them. I haven't decided on the content but it will be on the lines of building good habits.

Amit did the lecture for 6th standard and had, lets just say an intense experience :)

We are introducing them to Tenses, in more detail now.

Class is getting used to us and I think this is the time when we can get maximum stuff to them before they get bored of us.

SMK Private School | Year 2010 begins

Finally we started the year with a thin strength in the class. Most of the folks were off to their villages owing to Makar Sakranti.

Last time when we were there, school was planning a trip for kids to Wonder la and we asked them to write 10 lines about it. As expected only one guy came back with it, but we made some of them speak about it.

Here is what we covered:
- Tenses
- Verbs
- Rules for present simple
- Identifying present and past tense
- Rules/Exceptions
- Indian Map

Challenges as we see a.k.a. our prime focus areas:
- Getting people to come forward and talk has always been a challenge, so no more harping on it. Good thing is more people are getting comfortable with us and the idea of speaking in general
- Making people stop putting an ing in every verb they use. People are almost forbidden to use it now :)
- Speaking in words and not sentences.

Year 2009 concludes

The school will be closed all the Saturdays until it opens after winter break next year. We will be back to our teaching ways then.

Sampled new classes

Last two weeks we sampled two new classes. We were reaching a point of diminishing marginal returns (I think) with our previous class. We went to 5th and 6th standard and I think our efforts would be much more fruitful there given their lack of exposure. We are currently aiming to be with 6th standard and then keep aside a half hour open slot to go to any other class. Our principal is keen on getting us to every class possible so that nobody feels left out. Now, this is an excellent recommendation and I feel honoured that she sees value in what we are doing.

Let's see how it goes from here. Will keep coming back with any significant updates.

Fresh Blood in the system

After a recent volunteer meet, we have a new volunteer joining our group. Amit hails from Pune and has experience in teaching his cousin. He started with us last week and seems all geared up for the task.

We are planning to start a new class now and it seems ideas are flowing. Let's wait and watch, how it all shapes up in coming weeks. Stay tuned.

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.

We are back (for 09-10)

and back with an art class. Only this team we were not the ones teaching. Here is some really cool work from the students

Status | Mar 07, 2009 | SMK Private School

Attendees: Shashank, Prakash, Deepesh

This was our last class for this session.

- Students updated us on Annual function proceedings
- Revision
- Discussed the goals and some tips on what (subjects) they should focus on for them
- Importance of Time Management
- Simple Present (Negative and interrogative sentences)
- Importance of Reading and speaking English. We have asked them to read stories in their summer vacations

That's us :-)

Minutes of Meeting | Coordinators | Feb 28, 2009

Attendees: Jacob, Shweta,Anish Unni Kannan,Deepesh Yadav , Shree Kavya,sagar newase

- Knowledge of Kannada was considered a priority for the flow in teaching. Solution: Please attend the Kannada training program to be conducted by YFS in April.

- Summer Camp was suggested immediately after the exams. It was decided after a lot of discussion that this activity is solely on per school basis and depends on the interest level of the coordinators and volunteers. Those who do want to have this event. Please map out the details of where when how and what for this event and include Pallavi in your group emails.

- Children will have vacation in April/May. So Teaching sessions resume in June. Pallavi will mail to inform the date.

- On resuming, each group will meet with Pallavi and discuss out the syllabus and goals for the next academic year.

- During this vacation, volunteers will be invited to attend Volunteer Training sessions that will be conducted on weekends. This aims to improve volunteer teaching skills.

Status | Feb 21, 2009 | SMK Private School

Attendees: Shashank, Prakash, Deepesh

6th Standard

1. Revision for last class
2. Tenses - Overview of all. Simple Present in detail
3. Geometry - practical significance
4. Trick for calculating squares
5. Aristotle's three principles/filters
6. Exercise on the use of so/because
7. GK Topic - Internet
8. Rules for identifying divisibility - 2,3,4,5
9. Quiz - on all the topics covered in the class

7th standard

1. English grammar - introduction to tenses, use of yesterday/today/tomorrow
2. Preposition exercises
3. Differences between bought and brought, tense and tenses
4. Impromptu speaking and reading exercises
5. GK Topic - Construction of a building
6. Revision for last week

Status | Feb 14, 2009 | SMK Private School

Attendees: Shashank, Sravish, Deepesh

1. Revision for last class
2. Exercise on identifying tenses (future vs past)
3. Brief overview of percentages
4. Geometry - angles
5. GK Topic - India's Defence setup and India's neighboring countries
6. Conducted quiz - mainly on sentence completion
7. Speeches by students in English (4 in all) - We plan to make this a major part moving forward.

We also plan to take up another class starting now (7th standard) with Shashank and Sravish leading the effort!

Status | Feb 7, 2009 | SMK Private School

Attendees: Sravish, Prakash, Deepesh

Things Discussed:
1. Parts of Speech - Nouns/Pronouns/Verbs with exercises for identifying them in a sentence.
2. Creating sentences from jumbled words
3. GK Topic - Computers
4. Maths - Number Systems (Indian[lakh, crore] and International [millions/billions])
5. Some other fill in the blanks exercises (to identify the correct tense)
6. Revision of the things discussed

Hello World

This blog is an attempt at centralizing all the notifications and updates related to YFS. As its modest beginning currently it aims at being a place for status updates for our teaching assignments. Let's see how far it goes!