Weekly Updates: Aug 1st & 2nd 2009

[Prarambh]

Hi All,
Last weekend was full of fun and joy.

Saturday eve, Krishnam, who is one of the core members of Prarambh
team, brought cakes and chocolates for the kids/volunteers (Thanks
Krishnam! it was awesome) as he was going to join Hyderabad DC from
following Monday. Kids and volunteers then gave farewell to their
favorite friend/sir Krishnam.
Prarambh wishes Krishnam ‘All the best for his future and hope that we
only part to meet again  ’.

As we all know that every year, the first Sunday in the month of
August has been set aside to celebrate the International Friendship
Day. At Prarambh also, Sunday class started with kids presenting
friendship bands to each other. There were all colours of friendship
band blue, red, pink, etc. There was a time when kids actually forgot
that they have come to study. Some of the kids presented friendship
bands to volunteers’ too.

Hilarious moment was when Mangesh presented band to me and Payoshni
and started shouting that ‘Your wrist is so big that my friendship
band is getting shorter and shorter’.  


Below are the activities performed by different volunteers, last
weekend.
Saturday: Aug 01, 2009
[LEVEL 2]
• [Bhavna]:
[Nikita, Muskaan and Priyanka]: Initially, I took their Math’s
multiplication problems test. They couldn't do well as they didn't
know the tables properly. Later, I asked them to write numbers from
1-10 in words and memorize the same. Took their test in the end and
they succeeded in answering the spellings correctly. (Priyanka will
take some more time to grasp the spellings)
• [Dev]:
[Sudhir, Azhar and Mangesh]: We worked on ‘English workbook’. Worked
on sounds of A, E, I, O.

[LEVEL 3]
• [Ramya]:
[Sangeeta, Mamta, Sumitra and Madhuri]: Continuing from the previous
week’s studies, I revised the first three and then read them through
the next two paragraphs of the story book ‘Black Beauty’ by Anna
Sewell. I introduced them to a few words from that and made them get
their pronunciations, meanings, spellings and usage right. Then I made
each one read a line and explain the meaning.
• [Payoshni]:
[Ganesh, Prateeksha and Shweta]: Saturday had a lot of fun-filled
activities aimed towards teaching. All the 3 kids together, solved at
least 5 puzzles, mainly of simple words / then colours / numbers /
days of the week etc. The kids truly enjoyed this, and working
together inculcated a sense of competition as well as team spirit in
them. I intervened only when they needed assistance with big or
difficult words and mostly they were on their own. This also led to a
lot of brainstorming, which is great for English Vocab for the kids.

[LEVEL 4]
• [Kranti]:
[Rahil & Rahul]: I revised the verb conjugations with Rahul and Rahil.
(Verbs that we had done earlier like come, sleep, wait, keep, give
etc.) At the end they both gave each other a Test (fill in the
blanks). Now they have understood that third person (he/she) takes an
“s” for regular verbs.
• [Ashish]:
[Pooja, Aishwarya, Yasir, Kajal and Diksha]: I taught them the 'ch',
'sh', 'ph' words.


Sunday: Aug 02, 2009
• [Ankit]:
[Sanket, Neeraj and Bhagyashree]: They came for the first time so I
took a test to decide their levels. All can be put in level 1.

[LEVEL 1]
• [Prakhar]:
[Akash]: I first tested him whether he knows Alphabets by asking him
randomly. He failed in that. So I taught him all capital alphabets.
[Chiranjeet]: He knew alphabets till capital ‘C’. So I taught him how
to write capital letters till ‘K’.
• [Ati]:
[Kanchan]: I first tested her whether she knows Alphabets by asking
her to write letters randomly. As she could not do that, I revised her
all capital and small letters again.
• [Ankit]:
[Shradha]: I asked her to write alphabets in small letters. She did
few mistakes which I corrected and asked her to write again.
[Khushi]: I first checked whether she remembers letter ‘G’ or not,
last time when I taught her she was finding it difficult to recognize.
To my surprise, she remembered letters till ‘H’. So, I taught her to
write I, J, K and L by asking her write 30 times each.
• [Neha]:
[Bhagyashree and Supriya]: I taught them to speak ‘abcd’ till ‘g’.

[LEVEL 2]
• [Bhavna]:
[Nikita and Muskaan]: They learnt how to write numbers from 10-20 in
words. I also asked them to write and memorize tables from 4-6.Took
their oral test of tables and spellings from 10-20 in the end.
• [Dev]:
[Azar, Mangesh and Mangesh]: We worked on ‘English workbook’. On use
of A, AN, AND, ON, IN.
• [Ati]:
[Kavita]: Took revision on her knowledge of recognizing sounds of ‘A’
and ‘I’. Then taught her to recognize sounds of ‘O’ and ‘U’ with help
of some three letter words.
• [Ankit]:
[Mangesh Shinde]: For some odd reason he was bit upset on Sunday
morning and was not ready to study at all. After convincing him that
he won’t be taught more than 1 hour, he agreed to study . I taught
him sounds of ‘a’ and ‘e’ with the book for level 2. After some time
he felt good and took lot of interest in studying.

[LEVEL 3]
• [Payoshni]:
[Prateeksha, Ganesh and Shweta]: Since it was Friendship Day and the
kids were all excited about it, I asked them to write 5 sentences each
on their Friends and the special day. I encouraged them to write as
much as they could, in whatever English they could manage. After they
had finished their sentences, I corrected each of them individually
and asked them to re-write them again. Post this, we did some sums in
simple plus & minus (with logic). We attempted 4 such simple problems
in Math.
• [Hetuk]:
[Sangeeta, Mamta, Sumitra and Madhuri]: I took a spelling test of the
words and numbers (1 to 100) what had been taught to them on Saturday.
Did the evaluation, discussed the findings and practiced the spelling
mistakes / numbers what had been wrongly written by them.

[LEVEL 4]
• [Kranti]:
[Rahil and Nikita]: I taught Rahil & Nikita, the concept of time. We
started with words like half past, quarter to, quarter past etc. They
both were able to tell the time correctly at the end.
• [Ashish]:
[Pooja, Aishwarya, Yasir, Kajal and Diksha]: Continued with phonics. I
introduced them to the sounds of 'bl' and 'br' words. Such words /
sounds are called as BLENDS. And to check for their understanding, I
gave them a dictation test where I asked them to write words like
Baluchistan, Finland, broke, philosophy, mongolia, retire, dead,
honeybee, postit, limbaji' . This test was a complete revision of all
the sounds (alphabets and blends) taught till now. However, in this
test, I did not focus on the exact spelling, my focus was that they
should be able to identify the sound of each part of the words and
hence developing the words on their own. Quite a successful idea.

To know more about Prarambh, please visit http://wiki.ad.infosys.com/Prarambh
(Within Infosys Network).

To be a part of this activity, write to me at Ankit-...@ubs.com or
Kranti at Kranti_K...@infosys.com.


Regards,
Ankit Kumar
(On Behalf of Prarambh)