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