There is always a lot that needs to be done in schools, in the area of helping the students to become comfortable with the English language. It is language we study in, but more often than not it is not spoken very often in our homes, nor do we use it a lot when we talk to our friends. Learners need to have a lot of opportunities to use the language to express themselves. This is very difficult in classrooms that have very little interaction going on.
Initially in the co-curricular space:
So we have designed a program in which we offer some intensive creative workshops like story making and telling, poetry writing, theatre and puppetry for the students. The students get an opportunity to work with the language in creative situations. They work in small groups, each group guided closely by a facilitator. The initial workshops happen outside the classroom space with a facilitator:student ratio of 1:6.
Then inside the classroom:
Then, as the children gain experience in working in teams and have gained more confidence in their creative abilities, we move to the classroom and take up and weave activities around their text book unit, in the course of a normal 40 minute English language period.
In the next phase, we would be working together with the language teachers to prepare modules for teaching the prescribed curriculum.