Virtual experiences at The Atelier (Part 2)
Continued from Part 1
Conversation with Rythm Aggarwal
Please help me understand how the sessions that I’ve observed contribute to a child’s learning process. More specifically, how is foundational literacy and numeracy achieved?
So, the first thing we tell parents when they join the community is that there is a lot of unlearning to be done in terms of how we think of education. Even though on a day-to-day basis, you will not see pages and pages of A-Z or numbers being written, still, in the end, literacy and numeracy will be achieved.
We have to start with the image of a child. How do we view children? As smaller beings who need to be instructed? Or as independent, competent beings who want to learn?
Take the case of an infant. A baby will coo and babble and try to communicate with parents and caregivers, who in turn, talk to the baby all the time. Slowly, she begins to speak single words, identify objects, and by the age of 4 years, is able to communicate in complete sentences.
Learning spoken language is an extremely complex cognitive process, but it is done without any curriculum or drilling!
This happens because the infant has a functional need to communicate with caregivers.
As children grow, they also experience “reading and writing” through the print in the environment around them — they experience us adults read books to them, they see signboards on the road, they see name plates and door numbers on their doors and they see adults write around them. All of this assimilates into the idea that print carries meaning.
There are two fundamental principles to keep in mind:
- Function comes before form
- Independence comes before competence
Literacy
When children are developmentally ready, we introduce their names to them. Their belongings are labelled, their work is labelled. At the start-of-day meeting, their place is marked with their name. A functional need to recognize their name is created.
Children start by recognizing the first alphabet in their name, and if that is not unique, then they look at the length of their name compared to another name with the same starting letter. Their first experience with identifying, viewing and making meaning of print is personal and emotionally charged.
We build phonemic awareness of the letter -to- sound mapping.
We also give them scribble pads to “write” on. When they draw something, mentors label the sheets with their name and date. Over time, mentors invite the child to write his name. At this point, it may just be a scrawl — what we call “pretend writing”.
That’s what we mean by “independence before competence”. The child feels important “writing” his name, or “writing” a story. We give them stencils and stamps to help with letter formation. Slowly, they build competence as they learn all the letters in their names, their parents’ names, contextually meaningful words in their current vocabularies.
Then they go through a phase of “invented spellings”, for example “aeroplane” may be rendered as “arpn” initially. We tell parents that it’s ok, and spelling support comes later. There is no pressure to be “correct”. What’s important is that the children are using their growing knowledge base in literacy to write with a sense of freedom and are hence looking at writing as a “language of expression and meaning making”. Last year, the children of ages 5.5–7 years went through a six-month project where they authored books varying in contexts from recipes, nursery rhymes and storybooks.
Numeracy
You know, we’ve lost our appreciation of beauty in Math, with all the drilling that happens in schools. In early Math, there are three components:
- Numeracy (counting, etc)
- Geometry
- Measurement
When a child moves through the environment, she becomes familiar with the geometry of the room, the arrangement of the furniture, the distance between two objects etc. Everyday interaction with the space around them, naturally develops a sense of spatial understanding and the concepts of size and shape.
We use materials of different shapes, textures and colours and even young children tend to sort them by size, shape and colour, without being told to do so.
They use wooden bricks and planks to create structures which have elements of symmetry, perpendicularity, parallelism, balance, enclosures, aesthetics, and function.
With Numeracy, our aim is for children to develop a sense about numbers so that they use multiple strategies to think about numbers and how they relate with each other.
If we support children in developing their intuition about math, they do so naturally. We create and invite children to engage in multiple experiences which help develop Number sense — such as playing games, experiencing numbers through concrete manipulatives and functional experiences such as setting up their shop and taking the roles of bankers, shopkeepers and customers hence dealing in many transactions or purchasing movie tickets for a short film show set up by the mentors.
What are your goals (and non-goals) for this school year?
Our main goal this year is to provide a sense of connection. Of course, we’ve charted out learning objectives for each age-group and each child, but that is secondary.
What a child needs foremost is consistency and predictability. A feeling of reassurance that my mentors and my friends are still part of my life. Our mentors try to be present for the child and support their parents who are themselves going through a very hard time right now.
And we can see results. Just from a drawing by a child, we can sense where the child is in his cognitive and emotional state. For older children, we try to leave them with a sense of purpose at the end of each session — with work that they can carry on independently.
How are you and the team coping?
There is no whitewashing this — it’s been a very difficult time. We’ve had to adapt to the medium, and get over the anxiety and the nagging question, “Are we doing enough?” We constantly check with parents to understand what’s working, what’s not.
Are we frustrated? Yes. But it’s okay. There is no point in trying to replicate what was done in the physical space, so we’re constantly trying to re-imagine it in the online medium.
Even though everyone is physically separated, we set up channels for conversations, with the mentors, with the parents, where we openly share our vulnerability. Their support is what keeps us going.
Mentor interviews
Team 1: Vasudha and Devi (work with 3.5–4.5 year olds)
How do you prepare the environment for children to learn? Describe how it was in the physical school.
In every room, we create corners where we arrange
- sensory material (dough, sand, natural materials)
- extensions for Math (counting), Literacy (letter recognition), Cause and Effect
- construction material (blocks, cardboard)
- props for pretend-play
In the first 2 months of the year, we observe the children and learn their interests. Some may study how the sand behaves, some do pretend play. In this age group, their vocabulary is limited, so there is a lot of sensorial activity.
Around 3–4 months into the year, children start collaborating, especially in pretend play. By now, we know each child’s interest so we group them accordingly. We create Math and Literacy set ups for them.
When we see a strong interest emerge, especially for various children, we create a project around it. For example, last year, a couple of children were putting cardboard cylinders into a cupboard, pressing an imaginary switch and saying, “The cake is in the oven.” The next day, some more children joined, and began “selling” the cakes that the others “baked”. Then a few more joined. So, we created a bakery — cake shop set-up. We asked them what buttons were on an oven, and put up signs for those “START/STOP”, temperature settings, and so on. At the counter, we wrote down Prices, Flavours of cakes. There was so much Math and Literacy that we could weave into this single project!
We got them shower caps for chef hats and each child wore a badge saying “BAKER XXX”. We took them on a field trip to Cupcake Noggins nearby where they saw the whole process of making the cake, and we bought one for a child whose birthday it was. Back at The Atelier, we even baked a cake from a real recipe, that some of them could read bits and pieces of.
How do you prepare for the online sessions now?
So, if you had spoken to us three months ago, we would have been lost. There were so many challenges:
- Not being next to the child
- Requiring parents to set up the environment and material
- Parents not knowing how to facilitate
- Tantrums from children who were adjusting to this new medium
- The fear of being judged (because we don’t “teach” in a traditional sense)
At the beginning, we brainstormed to pick a topic that the young children could easily relate to. Devi knew this group from last year, and she knew they liked animals. We found a book called “Busy Ants” on Storyweaver and in the first session we read out this book. Over the next few sessions, one of us would read, the other would observe the children to see their reactions.
Then we made a video of real ants — crawling up a tree, carrying food, ants “greeting” each other — and we played it to them. We invited them to make their videos or send pictures of ants. Some of them went around looking for ants, leaving pieces of jaggery and watching a bunch of ants carrying one big lump!
Some children were more interested in the body structure of ants, some were interested in how they carry food, some were interested in the various things ants do. So, we divided them into groups based on their interests and this mini-project ended up lasting 3 weeks!
Our initial sessions were just 20 minutes long. Now they are scheduled for 40 minutes and the children are reluctant to leave at the end!
By early July, the children had settled in and we started mark-making sessions (drawing what they observe, learn, want to share about each activity). We also started sending out resource kits so that parents don’t have to organise all the material. These would have circle cut-outs, twigs, images of ants, black urad dal (which resembles ants), etc.
Parent facilitation has reduced now. We’ve tried different things, like one day, we just played music at different tempos and asked them to draw what they feel. On some days, we ask them to do whatever they feel like — draw or play with a toy, or share something with the others.
Collaboration is not as much as we see in the physical space but they do observe each other and get inspired by the others. Also, at this age, children are transitioning from parallel-play to collaborative-play, and that takes time.
How have you managed to juggle home and work in this new mode of working?
Vasudha: It has been hard. I have a daughter in 10th grade and a son in 1st grade. Both have their own sources of stress. My daughter misses being able to meet her friends, participate in events at school. My son isn’t able to play with other children of his age. We have our own share of meltdowns! At The Atelier, mentors would gather together to have coffee and take a break, and all that is missing now.
Devi: I really miss the physical transition from home to school that would happen during my commute. It would get me from a “home” frame of mind to a “school” frame of mind. Now, I have to force myself to get into the mode instantly before an online session.
Also, I had a surgery recently and am in my hometown, recuperating. I’m not working full-time yet. Since I am at home, it’s easy to get careless about self-care but I keep telling myself not to be that way. I don’t have any dependents, so I don’t have that load. But I guess each person has their own set of problems.
Luckily, colleagues at The Atelier are very supportive, so I don’t have to hesitate if I need to share something or ask for help.
Team 2: Kaberi and Vani (work with 5–6 year olds)
How was the transition from physical school to online engagements? How did you adapt?
Kaberi: It has been very challenging. I chose to be a mentor because I like being with children. We used to have such lovely conversations and conflicts, and not talk to each other, and make up again…it was beautiful. But now, not being physically present with the children makes us feel so helpless. What do we do in case of a conflict? Normally, we would let them try to work it and intervene only as a last resort. But 45 minutes is too short a time. Also, even though we’re very open and connected with parents, having them present during the sessions created a fear of being judged.
Initially, we would feel pressured that we need to be doing something every single minute — either Math or Literacy or Art or something. It was very overwhelming and there were days when I cried later. This is not how it should be.
I’ve been with this group of children since they were 2 years old, and we have a shared history. But with the online medium, it felt as if all of that had blurred.
Vani: This online medium has been a big transition for me. I like to hold the children when they’re upset or hurt, and I can’t do that now. I’ve worked with this group since last year, and I had to figure out how to maintain that relationship.
Kaberi: So, we began exploring how to adjust, along with the children. We would meditate, take some deep breaths. We would play around with Zoom, just learning how to switch on the camera and switch it off, how to mute and unmute the audio. It became a game — each of us would take turns to disappear and reappear. Children like to feel powerful, independent and heard. They like to have agency, and we had to give them that first.
Then we began creating resource kits, because we realized that both mentors and children have to be working with the same physical objects.
Vani: Of course, the tools we have at our disposal have been immensely helpful — Zoom, WhatsApp, YouTube, digital libraries and whiteboards. The parents have supported us throughout the process.
Kaberi: We did a number of trials. Just like Reggio is about Emergent curriculum, this was more like Emergent pedagogy! Should we do one whole group or separate sub-groups or 1:1 meetings? In school, the children are all over the place so we don’t have to decide these things.
In phase 1, we tried out a single group (14 children), but it was impossible for everyone to be heard and to get their space. No real conversation was possible.
In phase 2, we broke it into two sub-groups. Even today, we do keep shuffling the children up across these based on their interests and the activities we plan.
In phase 3, we introduced the 1:1 meetings, alongside the sub-group sessions. We noticed that children who did not open up in group sessions responded better in 1:1 meetings, and then they became comfortable even in the group sessions.
This is all still evolving. Every Monday, Vani and I do our planning for the week. We plan engagements and also a bunch of backup scenarios. We take cues from the children, and keep parents in the loop. We use the Kriyo app to send out pictures of the material from the resource kit that we plan to use during the sessions. Each parent has set up an Atelier corner in their home, where the material is accessible and visible. We do parent workshops to help them with all this.
Through it all, we’ve been trying to establish some consistency and predictability, because children need that.
How have you managed to juggle home and work in this new mode of working?
Vani: I’m very conscious of the physical space that I’m in…I’m comfortable in my space, in my home. I’ve realized the importance of taking care of my mental health. I live with my mum and we divide up the housework so that is not so difficult.
Kaberi: It’s been challenging. I have a 2.5 year old son, and when he bangs on the door when I’m online, it is so hard. Luckily, I live with my in-laws and they have been a huge support. But even then, there is just a door separating my school life from my home.
I miss the interactions with other mentors, with the parents when they would drop-off and pick-up their child. There are times when I feel really sad.
But, there are joys as well. Recently, we managed to get pretend-play on screen working! We’ve blocked 3–4 pm on Tuesdays for a completely optional session. Those children who want to join, can join. We’ve had such adventures — we’ve been to the moon and back, we’ve played different roles, it’s been amazing!
Author’s note: Speaking with the parents and mentors at The Atelier has just reinforced for me that in times of stress and uncertainty, the primary need we all have is for kindness. We will get through this period someday, and what each of us will remember is the people who were kind and present through this time — for us and our children.
Photo credit: The Atelier team
