Week 2 of Bookbus India is over. It has been great going back
to the same schools for a second time and seeing the children and teachers again.
We even got some excited children escorting us to school, in true Bookbus
style.
This week we decided on a theme of numbers and animals. For the
younger classes we read Walking through the jungle, which we brought to life with
giant pictures of the 6 animals featured inside and then acted out. It was a great
success and we really managed to bring the story alive, with all volunteers even
learning the Hindi animal names so as to help the children in classes 1 and 2 who
are just beginning to learn English. Many of the teachers watched our performance
and really enjoyed seeing the children’s participation.
This kind of interactive
learning is something new for them too. We then made snakes with them which were
a massive hit, especially when we showed them how they could run along making their
snakes twirl in the wind. One of my favourite moments of the week was when 2 very
shy ladies who look after the preschool children at school on Friday came over to
join us, with sign language and shy smiles, they signaled that they wanted to colour
too . When we showed them how the flat piece turned into the twirling snake,
they were amazed. It was a genuine moment of happiness and enjoyment that cut across
all language and culture barriers!
Many of the schools which we are visiting don’t have enough teachers
for one per class so often classes are combined or the teacher will write some work
on the board and then leave the pupils to get on with it. In some of the schools,
the brightest students of the upper classes are used to teach to the younger ones.
This was the final week of winter timetable in Rajasthan,
where the children start school at 10.30 until 3.30pm. From Monday Schools will
begin at 7.30 until 12.30 to avoid the heat of the day. Every day in India,
every school child gets a meal provided free of charge. This is delivered each
day by truck; this is an amazing feat of logistics, which is hard to get your
head around, when you think there are hundreds of millions of school children all
around India. It encourages school attendance and ensures that the children get
at least one nutritional meal a day.
Last week we found almost all of the pupils can recite one to
ten in sequence but that very few know the written words and they get easily confused
if the numbers are out of sequence. So this week we based many of our activities
on this theme, with a word and number matching worksheet, colour by numbers, word
search and memory games. The book we used was Handa's Surprise, which combines counting
with a brightly coloured and funny story. It also allowed us to reiterate the colour
theme of last week. It was great to see how many kids had brought back their colour
worksheets from the week before. The small group reading is a big hit with the
children and teachers because they have neither the time nor resources to
concentrate on a group of 3 or 4 pupils.
All the children at the five schools are enthusiastic and
really keen to learn new things. We can even see an increase and confidence and
willingness to try and speak English after just 2 weeks. Roll on week 3!!
Kelly - Mandore - 16th March 2013
