Agenda for January 30 meeting
From Cmi Spark
This describes the agenda set before the meeting. The meeting has not yet been held (or its details have not yet been put up)
To understand the background for this, please refer:
- CCCL Hexaware: first interaction with kids
- CCCL Hexaware: further data collection
- January 23 meeting: the details
- CCCL Hexaware: the project begins: by Vipul
Contents |
Venue and other sundry details
- Venue: Seminar hall (if free)
- Date: January 30, 2007
- Starting time: 6:00 p.m. (after arrival of the last IMSc-CMI shuttle)
- Ending time: 7:30 p.m.
- Open to: all interested students
Scheduling and logistics
Scheduling suggestions
The following suggestions emerged from Vipul after the session on Sunday:
- Separate teaching slots for Bengali/Oriya kids and for Telugu kids, all within Sunday itself. For instance, the Telugu kids could be taught in the 10-12 shift while the Bengali kids could be taught in the 2-4 shift. The main advantage of separate slots is that the room area is too small to handle a large number of kids
- For any teaching session, there should be at least two teachers who know/understand the language of the kids. Particularly there should be a person to handle left-out kids. For instance, in the session on Sunday, two Oriya girls and one Tamil girl felt rather excluded because we could not speak their language. A third person can help manage the boards, handle the teaching programme etc.
Volunteer management
The following is the volunteer situation:
- Bengali: Anirbit, Bodhayan, Arnab, Anupam
- Telugu: Ravitej, Bhanukiran, Jayanth
- Oriya: Anirbit
- Tamil: Nivedita, Padmavathi, Bhanukiran (somewhat), Jayanth (somewhat)
- Hindi: Anshul, Vipul, and the others (somewhat)
Thus, the only critical person is Anirbit (for Oriya -- there are two Oriya girls). For the others, people can take turns and have off-days. (if Anirbit decides to take the Sunday off, we will have to find some other way to cater to the Oriya girls or we will have to give them a day off as well).
Student management
Based on preliminary data collected on Saturday and Sunday, the following has been proposed:
- We prepare an attendance sheet for the students (including student and parent name) and take attendance each time
- We maintain separate progress records for each of the children (where we could possibly include a photograph and other data) and update these records after each session
Teaching programme and tools/aids
What to teach
The following are likely to be the focus areas (as per discussions in the January 23 meeting):
- Basic mathematics
- English alphabet (reading, writing, speaking and listening)
- Local language (reading, writing, speaking and listening)
- Some basic spoken Hindi
We need to chalk out a more advanced programme in each of these areas. One possibility is to get lists for what could be taught from the Internet and books, and use that to formulate a teaching checklist. A better possibility is to talk to organizations like AID India to figure out how to evolve a teaching programme. However, we don't have to choose between the two possibilities: we can start on using web resources to get some idea even as we try to contact AID India for a more formal orientation.
Some sample checklists (from a homeschooling guidance website): kindergarten stuff, firststandard math and preschool stuff.
What books to get
In order to begin our teaching programme fast, it has been suggested that Spark students try to give a package of relevant books to the children soon and start teaching the children using those books. This has the following advantages:
- Teaching from the books will help ensure that we do not miss out any basic things, and will lend more structure to our lessons
- The students can take the books home and work on them. Even if they don't work on them, the presence of the books at their home will itself help motivate them towards learning. We had a very positive experience in this regard with Satish, one of Spark's earlier beneficiaries.
- It may play a role in convincing the children, their parents, and the project office of our seriousness.
If we intend
