By Team | Educate Girls
Vinita* and Varsha* belong to a small village in Rajasthan. During an Educate Girls program implementation, Team Balika (Community Volunteer) Bhojraj saw them in the classroom and the first thing he observed was that both the girls were isolated from the class. They were the girls in Grade 5 who spoke the least, were always huddled together in corners and didn’t join their classmates in studies or play.
Vinita and Varsha both come from families with meagre earnings where both parents have to work in the fields to make the ends meet. They are also, like most of the children in their village, first generation learners. So, when they were struggling with their relatively lower learning levels in the populated classroom they could not depend on help coming from their homes. Furthermore, a lack of teachers in the school meant more number of students from different Grades clubbed together in a single room and more difficulty for the teacher to pay attention to those who might be struggling.
Both Vinita and Varsha found the classroom sessions difficult to understand. They couldn’t answer questions in class, couldn’t form or write words or sentences and were unable to grasp the concepts of basic Math.
But, this scenario changed when Educate Girls started implementing its learning curriculum in the school through the kits called as ‘Gyan Ka Pitara (GKP)’ which translates to Repository of Knowledge. The activity-based pedagogy focuses on building micro-competencies in English, Hindi and Math (children studying in grades 3-5) and has various tools like Cards for alphabet recognition, sight words, word family and conversation flip books, sentence strips, auditory and practice cards in English and Hindi. Number cards, rule cards, number boards and building blocks for place value and operations in Math. These tools are child-friendly, context specific and cater to the needs of most under-served and marginalized children in India. The tools and worksheets are more visual and activity-based in a way that they enhance reception and retention of the information that the child is being taught
Through the GKP kits, Varsha and Vinita are able to learn better. When asked, Vinita says she loves the ‘Gupshup Book’ (Conversation Book) as it has a lot of new information, pictures and she understands more words and their meaning. The ‘Word Family Book’ and ‘Sentence Strips’ are Varsha’s favourite because she says that the break-up of word sounds and the pictures have helped her read better and she’s excited that now she can also read an entire sentence like her classmates. Both girls are easily solving multiplication sums using the ‘Multiplication and Division Board’ and Varsha is now confident that she can read the story books that her elder sister had purchased two years ago, that until now were lying unused at home.
The teachers, and even the Educate Girls staff, are impressed with the tangible difference in the atmosphere and performance in the classrooms since ‘Gyan Ka Pitara’ was put into effect.
The huge progress that students like Vinita and Varsha are showing is further testament to the fact that Educate Girls’ Creative Classroom surely works!
*Names changed to protect the identity of the minors
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