Vision & Goals of Dream School Foundation (DSF)

DSF s vision:

Build a people’s movement to improve the standard of education in government schools to impact the lives of underprivileged society.

Goals of DSF :
I.To replicate and sustain a program, which accomplishes the following GOALS:

1. Mobilizing community-Neighborhood, privileged community, students
2. Improve infrastructure-components
3. Enable teachers, Parents, Students
4. To evolve the evaluation methods for measuring learning levels and deploy and train

II. To create structures and processes which will continue in perpetuating the above program

The vision and goals were finalised in the first week of August and the action plans would be freezed in a month or so. Presently DSF works with six schools 4 kannada medium , one urdu and one tamil medium. Maitreeyee leads the organisation and there are about 10 other core volunteers.

www.dsfindia.org

Action items for me

1. Along with Ajay come up with some plan for teaching in schools
2. Before Sep 20, come up with a plan for this bridge course kind of thing.

Lessons learnt till August 2005

With just the one and a half an hour slot, its difficult to create any major impact in the kids. Ofcourse there are some smart kids who make use of the teaching and shall become better students because of the interactions.

The fundamental problem that we have identified is "Communication skills(English)" of the kids.
This includes
reading/listening to comprehend
writing/ speaking to express themselves

So what is important is
see what could be done on these fronts in the weekdays.
e.g: Hippocampus reading material and task sheets
Buying kids 7th standard English medium Maths, Science and Social books.

Also we have to come up with periodic evaluation methods for these communication skill.

May be we could along with teachers try to come up with achievable goals interms of these evaluations.

After interacting with two 8th std kids, could see that writing and speaking English were their primary problems.

May be in every 2 hour slot, 1 hour we could evaluate the kids on their basic skills and give feedback to the teachers. In the second hour we could do some value adds from the interested volunteers side.

History

I have been working with the school for the past 3 months.

The school is tamil medium and they have English as part of their curriculum from 5th standard. I worked with 6/7 std kids.

First Month (June 2005):
In the first month I was trying to teach the kids English grammar. How to form sentences? I could take 6 classes. Could nt do much. But atleast some kids could form simple sentences.

Lesson learnt:
Wrt 6/7 std kids

Reading- Can read slowly.
Writing/Speaking - Cannot form sentences on their own.

Second/Third Month (July, August 2005):
I thought my, Anands, Mani s strength is Maths and Science. So y not teach them that. Also the teachers said that in 8 th standard the medium becomes English and then it becomes difficult for the kids.

On top of this, we three of us are not very regular. We have a slot from 10:30 - 12:00.

So we decided to take up Maths and Science, emphasising the English terminology.

Our experience with the kids for the past 2 months has taught us some lessons.
Also I got some idea about the goal of DSF as a whole.

Introduction

Hello Friends,

I am documenting my experiences about the association I have with RT nagar tamil school in the form of this blog.

The reason I am doing it is for sharing as well as document the evolution of this project.

Keywords:

Tamil school in Bangalore
Govt schools