Reducing school drop outs in rural India

Para teachers placed by the project have been supporting to strengthen the educational activities and learning outcomes among the students;

• Daily after school tuitions are conducted in project supported schools. The focus is to help the children to catch up on their school lessons and to do homework. Here they also practiced their reading and writing, and multiplication tables. In addition special home work is given to each child, based on what the child needs to learn.
• Provided educational aids: Students in all the schools were provided drawing note books, color pencils in the primary, middle and higher secondary schools; Tamil English Tamil Dictionaries were provided to all children from 5^th class onwards; and school atlas has been provided to children from 6^th class onwards in all schools.
• Drawing competition: Drawing classes were conducted in all the supported schools. In order to test the children’s skills, a drawing competition was planned and conducted, in which 26 students were identified as deserving to participate from a total of 12 schools.  the Drawing competiton was held at Kalanjiyam training center;  the top three best drawings were awarded with prizes.
• A Maths Competition was conducted for the students of with the help of para-teachers and support of the school authorities. A total of 220 students from classes I-V participated in the competition. Class I was tested in Counting, Class II in addition, Class III in addition, subtraction and tables, Class IV in addition, subtraction, multiplication and simple division, and Class V in all four mathematical functions. 5 different samples of the worksheets were prepared for each of the classes. It was time-based competition wherein, the student who solved the maximum number of sums correctly in the given time was adjudged as the winner. Five prizes and two consolation prizes were given away per class.
  

These special actvities conducted by the project are very encouraging for the rural children and empower students to improve their learning.