Ehsaas @ CYDA with kids from Patil Estate - 5 - 6th May

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  Just a quick update on what happened @ Ehsaas classes over the weekend. Nikhil, Bipin, Mrs Zong and Ravi took the Saturday class, while Richa, Nikhil and Ravi took the sunday class. Ravi is Ehsaas' newest member.
  
  We have not been able to lay our hands on Grond's suggested books. Nikhil and I tried at local bookstores here, but when I asked for publishers with names like Rapidex/Navneet, they gave me very downmarket looks. The Parochial bas%$#ds.
  
  For Saturday's class, we checked homework that the kids brought to the class (Dhananjay actually brought 44 words instead of 25. That is indicative of the level of enthusiasm) The other kids did the brought nearly 5 pages of sentences that they had conjugated in the first, second and third person in the Present, past, and Future tense (including simple, continous, and perfect tenses for each of the former tenses)
  
  We did a very interesting functional english exercise with the kids, where we walked the children through the right way to speak on the phone (it was etiquette + conversational english rolled into one), and had them recreate the daily scenarios (speaking to a store owner, speaking to a mechanic) in English amongst themselves
  
  On Sunday, only 2 kids showed up (the other 3 kids called me up later. They needed to go to the hospital to support the family of a friend who had died the same day)
  
  I missed the first half of the class, but I think the kids were walked through simple exercises of the Std 5 Balbharati. Throughly enjoyable weekend for the kids and Ehsaas.

Ehsaas @ CYDA with kids from Patil Estate - 30th April

For those of you wondering about the new volunteer in the first picture, His name is Shawn lawyer, and I invited him to join us teach the kids English. He is spearheading the CYDA "Traffic Watch" initiative in Pune. ( I might be doing some street plays with the CYDA Traffic Watch people soon ;)).

We first checked the homework assigned to them yesterday, and then continued with the books that we used on saturday, having the kids read in English (and improve their diction and pronunciation along the way) and then translate the paragraph into marathi/Hindi or explain it to them in Hindi or Marathi. It was a fun class.

Parth took on the responsibility of teaching the fundamentals of english grammar to Hemant, Vishal and Sunil (in picture 3). If I was one of those kids, I would have been amazed at the patience and trouble with which Parth taught that module.

The kids were given varying levels of homework (from bringing 25 new English words to the next class, to completing english sentences in the Present, Past, and Future tense).

Compared to Saturday when 7 Ehsaas volunteers showed up, only 2 showed up Sunday.

I see the need for better coordination while running this program vis a vis"
1. Volunteer participation
2. Course structure for the kids (it's a little to ad hoc at present)

My thoughts: Split ourselves into a Saturday and Sunday group, and let the "spoken english" program run for an 8 week duration.Your

Feedback/ comments will be appreciated