- Nomita (Curriculum Support & Facilitator)
7-year
old Samanya lives in the middle of a field under a tarpaulin sheet, insignificantly
tucked away from all the urban action. Samanya’s mother is a scavenger. Three
months ago, Samanya wandered into our learning centre, not far away from her
little home. Her hair was uncombed and matted, framing her beautiful face that
quickly broke into a smile! The sparkling black eyes, the dangling earrings and
nose-pin added to her charm. She invited herself into the classroom and sat
down, her thick silver anklets tinkling musically. Thus began Gubbachi’s
engagement with Samanya! (You came across her in this post by Deyone)
Every
morning, Samanya is here an hour before all other children and is often playing
on the slide when we arrive. She quickly runs to help us, singing as she opens
windows, straightens slates, chalk and paper. Samanya sings her own songs,
often weaving the Circle-time song learnt at Gubbachi, with other songs. The
languages are mixed too - Kannada with Tamil (her own language). She has a
beautiful voice and her singing brings a calm to the beginning of the day. She
settles down around the children’s books or sometimes writes on the board or
the painted wall surfaces until the other children arrive.
Days
pass, she moves on in the program, first through the early learning centre
activities, building her social skills, learning to communicate in the
languages of the other children, developing her fine motor skills, pre-numeracy
and pre-literacy concepts. Her morning writing moves from squiggles, to scribbles,
to more defined shapes that resemble inverted 2s, 5s, 7s, other numerals and
Akshara-like shapes. She is beginning to recognise the symbols of print in her
environment and imitate them – both numbers and letters.
One
morning she walks up to me and produces a jewellery catalogue! She asks me to
read it. I look at the page in front and point to the necklace in the picture,
“Isn’t this necklace pretty?!” She frowns at me, and points to the text on the
page and demands “Read this!” So I began reading, “The price of gold as
determined by …”. Her face lights up! She was happy and satisfied. She
snatched the catalogue back and sat down to read it.
Could
it be that I just confirmed to her what she suspected, that the text had a
relationship to the spoken? And … that the written word could be read and … had
some meaning! This is an important learning that emergent literacy talks about.
Making symbol (text) to sound connections, and connecting to meaning. Her
engagement with text continues. She gets books to the centre that her mother
scavenges. Next was a note book of some hapless engineering student. The graphs
she amusingly reads as “haavu” (snake) for a sine curve. Another graph is “aane”
(elephant), and so on! The circuit diagrams are “bus” to her! She now
demonstrates that pictures and text both hold meaning. Samanya has begun
reading!
A
few weeks later Samanya begins writing her name in Kannada and English. That’s
where she struggles! Her fine motor skills are yet developing. What helps her
grip is writing with chalk on board and with coloured crayon on paper. She writes
but the letters are inverted. She struggles to move her hand back to form the
curve for the ‘S’. What she does, interestingly enough, is to accommodate this
challenge using a lying down ‘S’ like a sine curve. To correct her orientation,
we try various techniques like tracing the letters on the floor and placing
stones in the direction of writing. Next she runs her index finger on sand
letters before attempting to write. She still makes errors. Demonstrating to
her while verbalising how the shape is formed seems to help her best. I show
and tell her how I am writing the letter. Saying, “I’m now moving my hand back
to make the last curve of ‘S’.” This helps her. The very next stroke she
attempts is right! She sports a wide grin! All she needs now is repeated
practise to master the letter.
Typically,
we’d expect a 7-year old to do this quite easily. However, while Samanya has a
rich repertoire of oral songs and stories, and ingenious, independent methods
to further her own learning, she has never before written on paper. While
listening, speaking and learning are innate; reading and writing needs to be
taught. Pre-schools spend months and years readying children for reading and writing.
Here, time is not a luxury - bridging learning gaps for getting children ready
for mainstream schooling to an age appropriate level means only one thing. Trying
to do the most in the least time.
Policy
decides that 6 months of bridging is optimum. How practical is it to look at
the bridge program as a ‘crash course’ when accumulated deficiencies are to be
‘bridged’? When many lost years are to be made up in 6 months? Something that
needs thought at the policy level.
