Education for 100 street children in India

It has been a challenging quarter for Ashraya with the pandemic slowly escalating in India. Although the number of cases have steadily risen, the lockdown has been slowly uplifting in the last few months. Schools and colleges have been shut down for a while now and online classes continue to keep the children busy. Ashraya has attempted to ensure that children have holistic learning outcomes despite the pandemic. To support this goal we have scheduled timetables for the children for them to easily balance school and afterschool support classes, provided them with tablets and phones, held parent teacher meetings every quarter and even held extra classes during the weekends. This past semester, the teaching staff has focused on developing curriculum, lesson planning, understanding child’s behavior, inclusive education and supporting specially abled children. Apart from this Ashraya has extended support in distributing food ration, hygiene kits, medicines and health consultations for the community families diligently for the last one year.  

Ashraya celebrates Science Day on 28^thFebruary every year to uphold the tradition of teaching children the importance of science in our everyday lives. Each child is asked to set up an experiment or create pictorial representations of importance scientific concepts. However, this year the entire team brainstormed, on how to conduct this important activity virtually. The staff was given various topics to choose from for their respective grades and coached each student to be able to perform these experiments at home. The children were given raw material and some guidance on how to create these experiments and explore their inner Einstein! The experiments ranged from simple ones for the younger grades like exploring how a water dispenser works to more complicated ones where one student created a cardboard model of a water tank and explained its entire functioning. Some of the elementary grades experimented with creating models of environmental processes like photosynthesis and the solar system. A few of the older grade students created robotic models which are a testament to their electronic and coding extra-curriculars. The teachers supported the students immensely and even tutored the parents on how to take videos and prompt the students when needed, ensuring that the parents too learned something in the process. The children enjoyed the Science Day enormously and we saw some innovative conceptions come out of them! 

Links:

• Science Day Video

Ashraya has continued to mitigate the effects of COVID19 across its community families since March. For the Ashraya families it began with the children restricted from coming to school, stringent lockdowns, subsequent scarcity of nutrition and loss of livelihoods. Ashraya had been supporting the communities with COVID response measures, food ration and health and hygiene kits. A food ration kit consisting of rice, pulses, wheat flour, sugar and oil is distributed to the community families every fortnight and that is often supported with masks, hand washes and sanitary napkins.

In the last nine months, Ashraya has conducted an orientation with parents and kicked of the new academic year 2020-21 remotely. The focus is on improving the access to quality online education to all our children and ensuring there is academic lag when schools physically reopen. Through rigorous teacher training, curriculum development, innovating teaching and learning aids Ashraya has managed to create a robust schedule for online classes and has been constantly ensuring to increase online attendance of children through distributing phones and tablets. For the occasion of International Literacy Day 2020, we brainstormed on a participative process of celebrating through a virtual platform. The request we received from children was that they were keen on building  their own personal libraries at home and if there was some way for them to receive books to read. The Ashraya team discussed and curated a list of 490 books based on the children’s grade levels, learning levels and interest areas. This list contained fictional story books (Sudha Murthy, Ruskin Bond etc), encyclopedias, non-fictional books (The Diary of Anne-Frank) and many others that the children desired to read. This list was then updated on Ashraya’s amazon wishlist and the book campaign, Build A Library, was launched on our social media, a week prior to International Literacy Day. The response received was overwhelming and we collected a total of 730 books that were sent to us by our wonderful supporters and well-wishers. The children have also been gifted all their books post the campaign and are excited about moving forward with this initiative of building their personal libraries. Post this successful initiative, we have decided that to conduct this activity annually, so as to give the gift of reading to our bookworms, from the comfort of their homes! For Ashraya's children, who have been braving the harsh effects of this pandemic, this is a small but poignant step in paving their way to a more bright future.