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