August 4th week

Sita School

On Monday we had no running or the computer classes as I was busy with the Calendar work. There is a lot of behind the scenes work with the calendar and I realized it was not an easy task! While we got the dates for the calendars done as screens for printing, we still had to assemble the images made by the children to make the other screens. This involved a lot of work after the images are done by the children. Anjali, Jane's daughter spent considerable amount of time from her schedule in doing this. It took me almost the whole day to just do some clean up on a few images (after the images are put together on a sheet to create  a theme, they are traced and then scanned. Once, scanned the dirt and spots etc. have to be cleaned up minutely in photoshop)

On Friday, Preeti could not make it to the session because of an emergency. So, it was Imo, Kamala and me. We had to work on the Skeletal system. Kamala did a good job of the introduction to the skeletal system in Kannada and had very nice interactive session with the kids. Later, we went outside the classroom to do an activity. While standing in a circle, the children had to identify the joints in the body from top to bottom. Every time they identified a joint, they would move it to ascertain the range of motion, the directions in which it can move and also relate it to the type of joint. We also discussed interesting factoids like how does a python's jaw open up to swallow animals as big as a calf, how many bones are there in the little toe of our feet etc. After the activity outside, we went inside the class room to watch a video on the skeletal system. There the children learned other interesting facts like the number of bones in the human body, what they are made of etc. At the end of the session, as a kind of immediate assessment, we played a game. I would whisper a kind of daily activity in one of the child's ears and the child would do a mime of the activity. The other children had to identify the activity and also name the joints involved in that activity. We asked the children to write down their understanding of the skeletal system at the end of the class.

More photos here- Sita_school_skeletal_system_joints_bones

Ananya


The children had dispersed for vacation the whole of this week and there was an ongoing workshop in Ananaya for teachers. I attended the whole of Thursday's session at the workshop. Prakriya school had its exams and holidays for the next few weeks and hence no games was allowed in the school. The teacher training workshop in Ananya was a lot of fun and I learned quite a few things. The session I attended was more on organizational skills and motivating oneself as an organization. It helped to build a collective vision for Ananya and define your role in it. We also came up with a plan to contribute more to Ananya in our respective roles.