‘Ba’ ‘Ba’ Black Bakri
Learning alphabet for young children is a challenging task. They find it very hard to memorize so many patterns in one go. And that too, without any logic or connection. One of our teachers from Hassanpur Mussuorie empathized with children in her class and designed a more engaging and contextual manner for teaching the sound and pattern of letters.
She felt it was best to introduce children to two alphabets per day, hoping that they have a strong foundation and a clear understanding. She decided to start her class with B or Ba in Hindi. Her first question to the children was — Name the animal that is small and gives milk, it is also found at homes? Most of her children keep goats at their homes and it was easy for them to quickly name the animal in hindi, “bakri” and then it became even more fun when their teacher asked them to make the sound of goat. They all said “baaaa” in unision. The teacher found a way to introduce the sound which built on student’s exisiting knowledge and would allow them to connect this with the new learning of letters.
Of course, this was not enough to help them understand sound of Ba. So the next question to the children was to name the vehicle in which people sit and travel on road. They named multiple vehicles and finally arrived at the “Bus”. Children were then asked to produce the sound of the first word when they say bus. In a similar manner, she then asked children to come up with names which start with the sound of ‘b’
The next exercise was for children to come up with words starting with the sound of ‘b’. Children started calling out names starting with B such as Badal and so on.
Now that the children understood the sound of ‘b’, the next challenge before the teacher was to train them how to write B. For this, she asked children to pick up stones and with it, she wrote B on the playground. Children followed the same and started drawing B on playground, after scribbling on ground they learn to write B.
The teacher then asked children lets find all the “B” in our school premise. They ran around in search of letter B. In one place they were excited to find the famous slogan “Beti Bachao, Beti Padao’ as they found three B’s. They also found Many more “B” on a board related to the Mid-Day meal scheme. During this activity students started counting of letters they found in school premise. Teacher was surprised to see the children are learning letter pattern and counting simultaneously.
After this activity teacher found that kids engage more when we bring their surroundings in classroom and ask more contextual questions to them.
When she was confident about the children’s knowledge, our teacher went on to introduce M to children.
If you resonate with our work, want to implement this model in your community, want to support this initiative, support crowdfunding campaign, or just want to drop in some encouraging words, we invite you to write to us at tarkeybein@gmail.com :) Thank you Deepthi for scribing this story!
