School for My Child

Curiosity catalyses the urge to learn One day, a six-year-old child stayed back after the story-telling session. She was curious to know something from her teacher. “How is it when you tell a story from the book it’s always the same, but when I tell the story from the same book it changes every time?” she asked. “I read the printed text in the book but you make up the story from the pictures,” responded the teacher. Just 15 days later, the child was ‘reading’ a story. I suppose her conversation with the teacher had developed in her a curiosity to know the mystery of the text. This created a strong urge to learn to read. Another child also developed the urge to read when she was not able to read the drama script along with her friends and we saw her making several attempts to learn to read. She would sit in a corner with the facilitators reading a book. She, too, learnt to read within a month. We saw that she read the script without help. The children learn best on their own; at their own pace, reading a book that interests them. Even children in the same age group can be at different stages of learning the four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). As a school, we can help them by creating the appropriate environment, organizing text-rich resources and ensuring their autonomy. We shouldn’t interfere at the cognitive level. If children sense they ‘don’t know’ they develop the urge to ‘know’ and look for the resources and opportunity to learn. They play with language to communicate with the world they live in, in the process acquiring the required skills. Experiments with language Children experiment with language in their attempt to learn. I’d like to share some observations of their ‘play and experiment’ with language. I remember an experiment my daughter made when she was 4-5 years old. She had a ball and wanted to play catch with me. “Papa, main phenkungi aap kechna,” she said (Papa, I’ll throw, you catch). Her use of the word ‘kechna’ took me by surprise. It was her creation, a mixture of the English ‘catch’ (pronounced kech) and the Hindi ‘na’, a suffix. We speak Hindi at home so English is not a language she’s familiar with. She must have heard the word ‘catch’ in a conversation or a film and understood its meaning. She was familiar with verbs like ‘doudna’ (running),‘koodna’ (jumping), ‘khelna’ (playing), ‘rona’ (crying) and ‘nachna’ (dancing). She figured out how and where to use ‘na’ and constructed the new word by adding the suffix to the verb ‘kech’. Top of all that, I salute to her conviction that she had figured out a suitable situation and used the word without hesitation and not for the sake of experiment but she actually wanted me to understand the game and want me to play with her. A journey of the evolution of the Democratic School (ANDS) in India, Everyone – researcher, parent, educationist, teacher, one reading for pleasure, I hope, find something useful and interesting.