Reducing school drop outs in rural India

Remedial Classes:

The Para-teacher focused on strengthening students in basics of Tamil, English and arithmetic. During the period the Para-Teacher focused on training the students read using phonetic sounds. Blends including sh,sm,fr,cl,br,tr were taught using flashcard and game of dice to make them more involved in learning the sounds. For Maths they made them do addition, subtraction, multiplication and also taught place value using a game of dice. Fr class X and Ix our teachers helps them to learn geometry measurements and graphs. The student’s found the activity very interesting.

Parents meeting for the slow learners have been facilitated. Considerable and Important points have discussed with the parents and our project’s objective and goal has been clarified to the parents. Parents were very much receiving and supporting.

At the behest of School management Tamil reading practice were initiated (Vasithal Vasappadum) to students who are struggling to read Tamil fluently, hence our team helped them in assessing students and train them with the audio and hard copy material given by them. Totally 61 students have selected for this from VI to X standard.

Spoken English Classes:

The trainer started taking classes for students from VI to IX on lessons including sentence formation, vocabulary, action words, opposite words and description using flash cards& speaking on a topic during the period. The trainer started giving test on word wall vocabulary, and commonly used verbs were taught with the spelling.

The trainer encouraging the students to set goals in learning the language and the purpose is to make learning more goal oriented thereby bettering the outcome and it has been observed that students started developing their Individual goals in learning language. Goal setting method is going fruitful for the students. The trainer commenced new listening activities to improve their listening skills in class hours. And also the trainer is using more new ideas in learning such as campus visit, group activity for story developing and etc.

Dear Friends and Well wishers,

THe project has been supporting a number of goverment schools to improve the quality of education. SOme highlighs of actvities in the last few months include:

The tutoring sessions focused on supporting the Xth class students for their board exams. They were made to read select questions including poetry, paragraph and one word answers for all the subjects. Slow learners for class IX were also trained to learn Memory poem and graphs in Maths.Tutoring sessions for the academic year ended this month, with board exams getting over for class Xth

A students English Newsletter club was formed with a total participants counting to 14 selected by the trainer from classes VI-VIII. The club worked on bringing out the 2^nd volume of the Spoken English Newsletter for the academic year. A total of club sessions were conducted during the month with activities planned for the club members. Activities including planning on Topics to be given for the newsletter, designing and voting for logo, preparing advertisement for the newsletter and discussion on design and editing content s for the newsletter for the newsletter.

Reading competition for slow learners in classes VII & VIII was conducted, since many students did not perform well during the previous event. For this purpose the students were regularly made to read from text books and story books in Tamil and English. Story books were bought for this purpose and few were printed out. There was a marked improvement among the slow learners with the students applying reading techniques including phonetic sand syllable formation in reading the books. Two students were adjudged as winners in class VII & VIII in Tamil and English and were rewarded with dictionaries.