July is the month when local schools have their summer holidays. This year Ravinder Kaur, a retired teacher who had been helping out in the school during her visit to family in Rakkar joined us and held a wonderfully interesting daily class for a steady group of 20-25 children each morning. Most stayed on or were complemented by others who came to our play sessions and computer classes every afternoon.
From 8.30 to 10 am everyday the children started coming to the community centre where they played with Ravindra and Vandhana until Ravindra Kaur arrived and joined the children in the library, relaxing together and picking out a book to read. They then went upstairs to our comfortable community hall where she read them the story, asking questions and making sure they understood. She invited them to pick out 5 words they were not sure about and gradually taught them how to find out from a dictionary what it meant or other children would explain to the younger ones using examples. This activity was so popular children picked not 5 but 10 and then up to 30 words they wanted to know and so during this month they have hugely increased their vocabulary in both Hindi and in English.
Our staff were very impressed with Ravindra Kaur’s skill and experience, not to mention her gentle kindness that kept so many kids regularly and enthusiastically attending her class and engaging with their school homework. Many of these children have never learned to study properly and have very low attention spans but they all improved remarkably during this time. We are very keen to invite her back in the autumn to work with our tuition class teachers so they too can learn to be so successful with the children.
In the afternoons the community centre has been abuzz with children playing – now we have the new roofing over the main section of the gallery it is much easier to manage with lots of children during the monsoon downpours. Vijay together with his new assistant Ankush have been holding two sessions in the computer room, the first group is full of girls who are new to the computer so they have been doing introductory sessions learning to type and use Paint and Word. The second group is mostly boys who already know quite a bit so they have been doing advanced typing, paint, word and are now familiar with Excel. During the last 15 minutes of the class the children love playing games on the computer.
In addition we were delighted to have had Mr. Dev and his wife who came as volunteers to us for 3 days from Chandigarh. He is a very experienced educationalist and held three wonderful afternoon sessions with the children. The first day he started with a game and then showed us all how to make paper toys. The second day we learned spray painting on paper with tooth brushes and in the last session, we sprayed oil paints on water and then one by one the children all printed their paper from it, revealing beautiful swirly patterns. This was a new and unique activity for our kids who loved it! Our team: Ravindra, Vijay, Vandana and Ankush participated in these activities so we can do them with the children in the future. We really appreciate such devoted volunteers who lend their time to our children, sharing their enthusiasm for creative activities with us too!
On Saturday 30th, the last day before the schools re-open on Monday, Mrs. Ravindra Kaur decided to hold a party for all the children who had been coming for her sessions. She organized poories and kheer for lunch and we bought a pencil case and diary note book for each of the children as a gift with funds from a very kind donor. The day was filled with games and activities and everyone had a wonderful time despite feeling sad that their kind teacher and wonderful mentor is now going home to her family in Delhi. We hope she will come back and spend more time with us!
