Literacy-based Summer Camp: Day 9
I brought printed copies of children’s stories that they had created on the Storyweaver website the previous day. Children were really happy to see the copies of their stories. Khwaja and Momin showed it to their friends and also took them home at the end of the day. It was really delightful to see them take pride in their creations.
Shweta and Sarika came early to the camp to author their stories on the website. They had a completely new story, which was written with the help of their older sister. It had no spelling mistakes, unlike the previous day. When authoring the story on the website, the girls came to me to ask for spellings that they could not read from their own stories. This confirmed the fact that it was not written by them. However, this is the story they wanted to author as it was perfect according to the girls. The idea of personal expression and expressing things in your own words continues to be a task. Children often want things to be perfect as per the standards they are used to in school, with little emphasis on their own thoughts finding expression. Children often take immense efforts to avoid any mistakes or want the task to meet a school-like standard. The following is the story that the two girls authored on the website. I assisted them with typing and selecting images for the story.
Scavenger Hunt
We began the day with the scavenger hunt. I have organised this activity the previous day as well, which requires a lot of preparation, including creating the riddles as well as hiding candies around the school space associated with a clue. Children really enjoyed this activity and continued to ask for it every other day. One of the reasons they loved this task, as I came to understand, is the candies that they procured. While the motivation for me is for children to engage with the language of the riddle, children often run around the whole school to find the candies. This sometimes creates issues as they find a candy associated with another clue. This was a learning experience for me and meant that next time I needed to design riddles that were a little more challenging and place candies in places that were not easy to find. See some of the riddles used for the game.
For some of the riddles, I then asked children to first guess the answer and then look for it. This alleviated some of the issues. It was also easier to manage the activity today without Sahil, who otherwise disrupts the class and tries to find answers to all the riddles by himself. I have come to realise more and more that for a camp like this, which caters to children from minority backgrounds and requires a slow and immersive engagement, one needs to keep high-achieving children from the classroom away to stop unnecessary comparisons and high-achieving children overshadowing their peers.
Plan your play
For the children's exhibition on 23rd May, children needed time to plan their performances. While they were given the freedom to perform any play, the two groups of children continued to create a similar play on the prevention of tree felling and the harms of deforestation. Also, children’s idea of a play is probably based on their earlier school performances which requires them to memorise each line and speak in a certain way. In the process of practising and creating the play, I appointed an older child as a director whom the other children had to see as the leader of the group. In addition, I continued to make suggestions on the alternate languages they could use in the play, including Dakhini, Telugu and English. In the process, children continued to engage in writing, discussing and thinking about characters and space, props, among others. Nevertheless, the script of both plays decided by the children was on the same topic of deforestation. I suggested to the children that they need to think of alternative scripts that make the teachers and parents who come to watch their play think. I hope to create an activity next week that helps children move away from a regular style and script of a play to something that expresses their own life and world.
Describe the Object
In the next few activities, I wanted children to speak and think about language structures. Hence, I used a game where children had to describe an object without naming it while others had to guess. Children initially found this task difficult. I had to ask them questions about its weight, texture, size, etc. After one or two children, they got the hang of it and became excited to participate. The moment of reveal of the object became the highlight of the game. While children often tried to describe the object in English, they also began to use words from Telugu and Dakhini.
We began the day with the scavenger hunt. I have organised this activity the previous day as well, which requires a lot of preparation, including creating the riddles as well as hiding candies around the school space associated with a clue. Children really enjoyed this activity and continued to ask for it every other day. One of the reasons they loved this task, as I came to understand, is the candies that they procured. While the motivation for me is for children to engage with the language of the riddle, children often run around the whole school to find the candies. This sometimes creates issues as they find a candy associated with another clue. This was a learning experience for me and meant that next time I needed to design riddles that were a little more challenging and place candies in places that were not easy to find. See some of the riddles used for the game.
For some of the riddles, I then asked children to first guess the answer and then look for it. This alleviated some of the issues. It was also easier to manage the activity today without Sahil, who otherwise disrupts the class and tries to find answers to all the riddles by himself. I have come to realise more and more that for a camp like this, which caters to children from minority backgrounds and requires a slow and immersive engagement, one needs to keep high-achieving children from the classroom away to stop unnecessary comparisons and high-achieving children overshadowing their peers.
Plan your play
For the children's exhibition on 23rd May, children needed time to plan their performances. While they were given the freedom to perform any play, the two groups of children continued to create a similar play on the prevention of tree felling and the harms of deforestation. Also, children’s idea of a play is probably based on their earlier school performances which requires them to memorise each line and speak in a certain way. In the process of practising and creating the play, I appointed an older child as a director whom the other children had to see as the leader of the group. In addition, I continued to make suggestions on the alternate languages they could use in the play, including Dakhini, Telugu and English. In the process, children continued to engage in writing, discussing and thinking about characters and space, props, among others. Nevertheless, the script of both plays decided by the children was on the same topic of deforestation. I suggested to the children that they need to think of alternative scripts that make the teachers and parents who come to watch their play think. I hope to create an activity next week that helps children move away from a regular style and script of a play to something that expresses their own life and world.
Describe the Object
In the next few activities, I wanted children to speak and think about language structures. Hence, I used a game where children had to describe an object without naming it while others had to guess. Children initially found this task difficult. I had to ask them questions about its weight, texture, size, etc. After one or two children, they got the hang of it and became excited to participate. The moment of reveal of the object became the highlight of the game. While children often tried to describe the object in English, they also began to use words from Telugu and Dakhini.
In the two weeks, while earlier, children only sat on benches and spoke with crossed hands, and their bodies often tensed around me. Children had begun to feel at ease in the class, sometimes sitting at the table or going out of the class to drink water on their own. However, I noticed that children often went to drink water together in groups with their friends, when they played with water or used this as a chance to chat with their friends undisturbed.
Scrambled Sentences
A game of scrambled sentences involved several words that children had to put together to form a coherent sentence. This was a group activity which many children found difficult. This may also be because I gave them a complex English sentence with a main and several subordinate clauses. The differing reading levels of children and language comprehension came through in this activity. Children as old as 14 or 13 years were unable to finish the task and required several clues. However, Sarika and Shweta, 10 and 12 years old, despite their age, were able to finish the task sooner than others.
A game of scrambled sentences involved several words that children had to put together to form a coherent sentence. This was a group activity which many children found difficult. This may also be because I gave them a complex English sentence with a main and several subordinate clauses. The differing reading levels of children and language comprehension came through in this activity. Children as old as 14 or 13 years were unable to finish the task and required several clues. However, Sarika and Shweta, 10 and 12 years old, despite their age, were able to finish the task sooner than others.
The activity, however, forced all children to think about the structure of sentences. Since this was a group activity, which required them to speak to their peers and discuss. In addition, many wrote down the words in a book and engaged in sentence construction and deconstruction. I will perhaps use this activity again next week.
Brainstorming Happy
We had ended the previous day with Pharrell Williams’s song, “I am Happy”. As homework, I had asked children to think of things in their lives that make them happy. We used this time to get children to write their thoughts on the chart paper. Some children were enthusiastic about it, while others were not so much. Often, too many thinking activities one after another, tire children up. Seeing the frustration in many, I kept the activity short and motivated them to finish the task so we could move to something else.
As a response, children often wrote about games, play, friends, winning, their favourite object, which made them happy. See the image above for children's penned responses.
Games
We ended the day with a few games, like Fire in the Mountain and Simon Says, which the children seem to enjoy and keep asking for multiple rounds of. Some of the younger children also said that they play these games in the evening, in their neighbourhood.
Before leaving for the day, Salim promised to come early the next day to finish his story. He seems very motivated to finish his story and see it in print, like the rest of the children. It is really heartening to see him speak and express himself without any fear. This is the case with Khwaja, too.
Note: All names are pseudonyms. Photographs of children's artifacts and the processes were taken with each child's permission.
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