Techie Sisters enable Success of neighbourhood Government School
Teaching is not everyone’s cup of tea, but when one starts teaching little kids, it’s hard to stop. Meet Shilpa, a techie from Bengaluru who volunteered to teach English at the Gopal Ramanarayan Model Primary School (GMPS) at Dollar’s Colony.
She said, “Our association with GMPS school goes back to the academic year 2017–18. My sister Roopa and her husband Bharani stay very close to the school and they approached this school to see if they could teach computers to children. They were given class seven students. The school has a well-equipped computer lab and they taught (theory and practical) about 12 kids of class 7. When the term ended they asked if the school would need any other help in terms of teaching.”
That was when Mamatha Miss- class teacher, class 7, picked about seven students and asked if they could be taught English. Roopa readily agreed. Since the classes were happening at Roopa’s house, Shilpa joined in and started training them in reading and spoken English. The children were thrilled. They were at least four who never missed a single class. About 17 classes were taken up during summer vacations.
“We learnt that the school was planning to launch an English medium section for class 6 from the academic year 2018–19. Till then for the children, the medium of instruction was Kannada. They definitely had difficulty in reading and speaking fluent English. The school needed a teacher and that was when I volunteered to teach English. It was a challenge, indeed. I had no formal teacher’s training. I was initially told that I would have to teach about 16–20 kids, but the batch had 40 students. Classes began in the first week of June. In the beginning, I tried to get them to read stories from my personal story book collection. Many students struggled to read simple words, like bat, cat and rat. They would see the pictures and guess the story. They were also few kids who could read simple sentences,” said Shilpa.
For Shilpa, the first few weeks, went about in building a bond with the children and understanding their level of comfort with English. “As I was planning my strategy to teach, I came in touch with Jaideep from team Tarkeybein. We understood that Tarkeybein has English learning curriculum for children at different levels. We got the pre- assessment book for kids and 40 kids were assessed on how much they can read. We realised that there were kids in three different levels-those struggling to identify letter patterns, children who could identify letters and simple words but were not able to identify four letter words and then they were kids who were able to identify and read four letter words and simple sentences, but did not understand what they were reading. By mid- July, we got books from Tarkeybein, “ she said.
Following this, the class was split into two sections and Level-3 students attended class at 8.30am Level-2 students attended the class at 9.30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The class for Level- 2 children began with ‘I can read books’- books with pictures and text against them. There were also simple sentences that can be read and understood. Shilpa taught about 12–15 words everyday because she did not want to burden the kids.
From August, Level-3 students were introduced to work books. The first few topics were joining letters forming simple words and being able to read that. The second section had little poems that the children could read with rhyming words. Questions related to the poem were based on real life. The third section was about essays on simple subjects like park. By end of Feb, Shilpa had done 8–10 essays.
She did not depend on books alone. “We did a lot of other things like quizzes and found that the children were extremely competitive. For Level- 3 students, drama was part of learning. I assigned a group of four students, scenes from real life like travelling in a bus and they had to get into the mood and the conversation would flow. They were never interrupted and whatever was presented in Kannada- would be written in English on the board. This was followed by a couple of rehearsals and students would have to practise the same in a group. We did about four dramas and it became very popular among the children that they started asking for me.”
Over the weekends, Roopa went to the school to pick about 10 kids struggling with language. They were coached separately. A few students took lot of interest in English, after the special sessions. Additionally, English cartoon videos from Youtube were also screened for the students, while most narrated in Kannada there were many who attempted to explain the videos in English.
Teaching is not only a noble profession, but has loads of emotions attached. “I was deeply moved when two kids walked up to me with cards that read “Happy Teacher’s Day’. Everytime I told them that I would take a holiday, they would be disheartened- which was a motivation — I realised that children are eager to learn. The learning process has to continue. I have told them to watch English documentaries and to read one page of English text from a story book or text book everyday. Children keep asking if I would teach them next year too. I won’t want to say no…” concludes Shilpa.
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!
