Sunday Regular - 01 Jul '07

better late, than never...

this week the plan was to read with the 7th std kids... the biggest number so far... megha, ramya, amreen, anjali, navya... and i think i'm missing some one (or two)... after leafing through some of the books available, we settled on a collection of the chandamama issues... shilpa too joined me on this session...

amreen volunteered to start reading... the idea was to rotate among the kids, with each one taking off from the other after a while... but not every one was enthusiastic to read... and of course, many were there just because i asked for all the 7th kids and not because they all wanted to read or sit in a session or anything like that...

some kids are from kannada medium, and are not good with their reading yet.. and so are extremely shy to read in front of everyone... so the reading stayed with the already good few... tried to get them to stop and recap the story in between... or ask another kid to repeat the story... sometimes in english or in kannada... sometimes, when certain words seemed hard, we explained the meanings of the words...

soon, the reading session migrated into a speaking session of sorts... the kids were asked to speak for a minute in english on any topic of their interest... they didn't do all of it in english, often resorted to kannada... this soon became chit-chats, but at least the kids were talking... the talks touched up on topics ranging from the real and nick names of the kids to salman khan's muscles!! i was a bit shocked at 7th std kids liking salman khan's muscles and all (i must have had a retarded growth, a film actor's muscles were nowhere in my consciousness when i was in 7th std), but i think i successfully managed to mask my emotions for fear that it will tick off the kids from talking...

anyway, though the reading session migrated to a speaking session to a chat session, it was a good interaction... the kids were talking, though not all as open and confident as i would've liked...

still as confused as before, about going forward... R keeps bombarding me with forum vatsalya and i continue to be apprehensive about the prospects...