Learning at Saandeepani
In this blog post, I take you down Sarjapur Road to spend a day at Saandeepani Academy for Excellence, founded by Prarthana Gupta in 2008. It began as a preschool and expanded to primary grades in 2011 to cater to the children of the neighbourhood. Today, their seniormost children are in Grade 9, and they will soon be affiliated with CBSE.
You step in through the gate and see a mango tree, with a tree-house and a wooden monkey peering down from the branches. The buildings are arranged in a linear fashion - first the kindergarten block, followed by the grades 1 and 2, and then the higher grades behind them. That leaves a swathe of open space to the side — with a swimming pool, a volleyball court, gardening plots and an amphitheatre beside a copse of trees. Trees are integral residents of this place.
A good beginning
Every day begins with Ekaant Reading — 15 minutes during which each child takes out a book of his choice and reads it. Then, the class teacher has a 30 min period where they discuss Living Values. I observed this discussion in a Grade 3 classroom, where the topic was Peace.
Ms. Remya asks the children to name the common complaints that cause fighting. One says “pencils and erasers”, another says “if someone takes my things”, another says “not sharing food”, and so on. She asks them how they feel when this happens. Answers range from “bad”, “upset”, “sleepy!”, “get a headache”, to “feel like going to the peace corner” (this is a corner of the class where any child who feels restless can go and spend a few minutes to breathe deeply and recover).
She asks if they think it is important to find a solution. “Yes”, they say. She tells them that over the next few classes they will come up with ways in which each of them can become a “Peace Star”. She ends the class by asking them to close their eyes and reads out a soothing passage from a book. Finally, she hands out sheets of paper on which each of them should draw a star with some emoji inside it.
Naming our numbers
I then scurry off to see the second-graders learning Maths. Ms. Deepti is talking about Number names. She starts off by asking a few children to say their names. “Imagine what would happen if you had no names?” “Ayyo!” is the cry of dismay all around! “So, names give us our identity”, she says. In a similar way, numbers also have names.
In an earlier class they had covered single- and two-digit numbers, which she recapitulates. She makes a few intentional errors, which the children immediately spot: 43 — fourty-three, 92 — ninty-two. She sounds out those words phonetically so that they will remember the correct spellings.
Then she goes on to three-digit numbers and does a few examples on the board before dividing them up into groups of 4 each. They are given place blocks (Dienes blocks) to work with. These consist of “unit cubes”, “ten towers” and “hundred flats” to indicate the place value of each digit. They chatter as they work, the sound levels rising steadily until Ms. Deepti says that she is going to put on some music. With music ON, noise should be GONE. And it works! They still talk, of course, but in a lower tone of voice.
When the activity is completed, they get back to their desks and write in their workbooks. Ms. Deepti goes around the classroom, answering questions and checking their answers. (I see a little boy fish for his pencil in his bag and find a recently fallen tooth instead! With great care, he places it inside his desk. Does the tooth fairy come here as well?)
A walk in the garden
Ms. Mai Moona, the preschool co-ordinator, now takes me to their Sr. KG class, where Ms. Sumithra and class are discussing a garden walk that they took yesterday. The children are seated on mats, with little stools in front of them. She asks them to close their eyes and relive the experience. What do they see? The children remember honeybees, the lotus pond, flowers, butterflies, small fish in the pond, trees…
She asks them, “Did we step on the plants?” “No”, they chorus. “Did we pluck any flowers?” “You plucked one rose for our activity, after taking permission”, says a little girl. “Who takes care of the garden?” “Farmer”, says one child. “Prarthana ma’am!”, says another. Ms. Sumithra reminds them of the word “gardener”. A discussion follows on how to take care of a garden.
She now distributes sheets of paper and pencils to each child and asks them to draw what they had seen in the garden. She reminds them to write the date. A little girl beside me laboriously scrawls “11–7–2108”, putting us 90 years into the future :-) She draws blades of grass across the bottom of the page, and a single plant amidst them. Another child wants to know how to draw a mango tree, so Ms. Sumithra does a quick sketch on the board. Each child then presents their drawing to the rest of the class and describes what they had seen.
A shadow teacher helps a neurodiverse child with his drawing. She also calms him down whenever he gets restless. Saandeepani has a partnership with Stepping Stones Center, an organisation that works with neurodiverse children. Their special educators work with these children at Saandeepani during pull-out sessions, and there are periods when the child is in the classroom with the others.
Ms. Mai Moona shows me their Montessori environment, which they have just started. Currently, the preschool children spend some of their time here working with the materials, and gradually, this time will increase.
In Tsarist Russia
Next, I spend some time in high school attending a history class with ninth-graders. Ms. Lathika asks the children to form groups of 4. She distributes an essay about the political conditions in Russia under Tsar Nicholas II and asks them to read and discuss it. After this, each group will present the material and take questions from the others. She mentions roles that each group must have — a discussion moderator, a scribe, a presenter and one person to handle Q&A.
The group next to me goes into a huddle, with each child contributing his/her bit. A girl starts to read out the text, a boy picks up a dictionary to look up some terms, another supplies wisecracks :-) Around me, I hear mutterings of “serfdom”, “church”, “aristocracy”, “feudal”, “industrialization”, “land-holdings”, “Rasputin” (I expect recognition of this name but then I remember that this generation did not grow up with Boney-M!)
The presentations and discussions follow. There is debate about Nicholas having good intentions but being misled by this advisors, discussion about how the lives of peasants did not improve even after serfdom was abolished, questions regarding the similarities in a peasant’s life and that of a factory worker. One group brought up parallels with the French revolution and discussed Louis XIV vs Nicholas II. One boy asked why Nicholas did not get rid of Rasputin? Ms. Lathika chimed in and said that is something they should research later, because it wasn’t part of the text.
I really had to hold myself back from speaking up — it was so interesting! I also realized how hard it must be for a teacher to create a lesson plan for just 45 minutes, especially in higher grades, where topics can go to great depths. After the class, Ms. Lathika told me that she intends to show them some films set in that period, once they are familiar with the basic flow of events.
How fast does it move?
Then, I was off to middle school for a Science class with seventh-graders. Ms. Muthulakshmi was helping children work out numerical problems to compute the average speed of an object, given distance and time.
The children are seated in groups, each group discussing the first problem. This is to compute the average speed of a car that travels 225 km in 5 hours. They work it out to 45 km/hr, then she explains how to convert this to m/sec.
They move on to the second problem, which is pronounced as “damn easy” by some boys seated in front of me :-) A bird flies 10 km in an hour. How far will it fly in 3 hours? They arrive at the answer of 30 km, and convert it into metres. Easy, indeed.
She now distributes a different question to each group. The group in front of me gets a cyclist doing laps of a track. They rush to solve it mentally and arrive at the wrong answer, because they have misread the question. The time given was not per lap, but for all three laps together. So they have to redo it.
There is healthy competition between the groups, and then each group comes up to present the problem on the board.
One group had to compute the distance from the Sun to the Earth, given the speed of light as 3 x 10⁸ m/sec and the time taken being 8 min. There is shock and disbelief at the speed of light! Really? It is that fast?! They double-check with ma’am if this is the correct number. The girl presenting the answer writes out all the zeroes, which makes a boy wonder aloud what it would be called in the Indian numbering system. Then he asks what unit is bigger than arab in the Indian system. It is interesting to see how their minds work!
Learning Hindi through gardening
After lunch, I was to observe a class on Hindi awareness with gardening. This had me stumped! Prarthana explained that instead of burdening the little ones with three languages to be learnt formally, they are introducing them to spoken Hindi during their gardening class. I thought this was really innovative! Children are happiest when digging in the earth, and speaking another language is no big deal for most of them.
The Hindi teachers Ms. Vandana and Ms. Neha have escorted second-graders to a gardening patch. The children are furiously digging the soil, preparing the kyari (flower bed). There are cries of “Main karoonga, ma’am, mujhe karna hai”. New vocabulary is being learnt — beej (seed), ankur (sprout), paudha (plant), mitti (soil). They discuss what is needed for a plant to grow — hawa (air), paani (water), sooraj ki roshni (sunlight), khaad (manure). Nearby, there are two boxes filled with seed balls that the children had made earlier.
After sufficient activity, they troop back into the classroom and do a recap using a poem that talks about a little seed sleeping in the soil. They go up to the board and draw little seeds; some of the seeds are smiling.
A dash of drama
My day ends with a theatre class for second-graders conducted by a teacher from Dramamia, Ms. Amrita.
We begin with a song about Zelda the zebra. Every night, she takes off her stripes before she goes to sleep. One morning, she finds them gone! She is distraught…she meets a lion, who laughs at her for looking like a horse, but then takes pity on her and offers to help her find her stripes. Then they meet a monkey, and a frog, and each animal in its own voice chatters or croaks its promise to help. When Zelda sings the chorus: “Yipes, yipes, I’ve lost my pretty stripes” the children join in with gusto!
Finally, they meet a tiger, who confesses that he had ‘borrowed’ Zelda’s stripes because his own had become dirty and hers were so nice and clean! He promises to return them and all ends well. (Most importantly, I now know the answer to the question, “Do zebras have white stripes on black bodies, or vice versa?”)
Then she introduces a new song, which is even wackier. She opens a shoe-box and takes out models of planets. This is a story of how our dear planet Earth had gone to sleep wearing her blue blanket of water, but woke up to find it gone! She complains to the Sun, who sets out with her to recover her water.
Mercury says she is too little to hold all of Earth’s water, so obviously she couldn’t have stolen it. Venus says she’s too hot, so the water would evaporate. Mars says mockingly, “If I had your water, would I look red to you?”. Jupiter and Saturn declare that their gaseous constitution would prevent them from holding much water, and the final suspects left are Uranus and Neptune. After much wrangling, Neptune starts to cry. That nails it, because how can you cry without water?! Mercury points out that Neptune must be hiding the water in her ice. And Neptune confesses all and returns Earth’s blue blanket.
Finally, I spend some time with Prarthana and Ms. Jayanti Roy, the Principal, describing my day and listening to their stories. During the day I also met the Vice-Principal Ms. Suganthi Narayanan and the school co-ordinator Ms. Latha. Their sincerity shines through, and I can sense the effort that goes into the whole process of running a school, balancing and juggling different factors.
As an observer, all that I have seen today is just the tip of the iceberg, the outcome of many hours of planning and preparation. In a later post, I hope to take you backstage and provide a glimpse of that process.
Education today is at a crossroads — where we must discard the parts that have become irrelevant, and yet retain the essence of values and skills that are essential for our children to thrive. Schools that are doing this deserve our appreciation so that they can do their work wholeheartedly.
Photo credit: Saandeepani team
Read about how teachers at Saandeepani prepare for their classes here
