If it's not too presumptuous to say so, I hope to endow Rising Star children with a legacy: a legacy of reading. I found literacy rates to be low, both among children and teachers. But the library, in its two-week history, has already been uproariously (and I mean that quite literally, given the noise level accompanying the enthusiasm) popular.
Library periods weren't part of the curriculum, and yet I wanted to allow everyone reading time. After much head banging and cogitating, I came up with a solution that struck two birds with one stone. We shifted the schedule and now have half an hour before school begins, during which one third of the school attends math tutoring (also sorely needed) and the rest reads library books.
Thrice a week in the afternoon, there's English tutoring (which I am designing to be a phonics reading program; the reading instruction in India is traditional and based solely on memorization). The tutoring classes take turns using the library, which allows those children, many of whom are also in math tutoring, to look at the books.
Here's Ragu with one of the library's most prized holdings: a Disney book. When I was organizing the library, I removed the Disney stories from the stacks and arranged them on a separate shelf. I didn't want these (if I may say so) unpoetical and sometimes ungrammatical books mixed in with the others! Unbeknownst to me, they were to instantly become precious commodity. Most popular of all? Lion King.
The teachers were not quite as willing as the children. It took not a little persuasion and patience to convince them to pick up a somewhat longer book. Several of them are reading Charlotte's Web with me. We look up words on Wikipedia (concrete nouns) and on an online Tamil dictionary (verbs and adjectives). Several had never used the computer before and it was moving to see their excitement at seeing Wikipedia for the first time. [The painting on the wall was done last month by a volunteer who's a high school art teacher in the States. It took me a moment to make the Jungle Book-India connection.]
Brothers Yokeshkumar and Vigneshkumar showing off the book they read to me, for two stickers apiece.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left!
Library periods weren't part of the curriculum, and yet I wanted to allow everyone reading time. After much head banging and cogitating, I came up with a solution that struck two birds with one stone. We shifted the schedule and now have half an hour before school begins, during which one third of the school attends math tutoring (also sorely needed) and the rest reads library books.
Thrice a week in the afternoon, there's English tutoring (which I am designing to be a phonics reading program; the reading instruction in India is traditional and based solely on memorization). The tutoring classes take turns using the library, which allows those children, many of whom are also in math tutoring, to look at the books.
Here's Ragu with one of the library's most prized holdings: a Disney book. When I was organizing the library, I removed the Disney stories from the stacks and arranged them on a separate shelf. I didn't want these (if I may say so) unpoetical and sometimes ungrammatical books mixed in with the others! Unbeknownst to me, they were to instantly become precious commodity. Most popular of all? Lion King.
Brothers Yokeshkumar and Vigneshkumar showing off the book they read to me, for two stickers apiece.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left!
Love it.
ReplyDeletePhonetics based reading is really the way to go with most kids. Memorization is deathly boring and slow. I am so inspired by what you are doing.