Monday 9 July 2012

Switching Roles!


“Aka come. Aka please come, nothing will happen “was what the girls were again and again saying to Jayasi and me in order to convince us to try the different swings.
Jayasi and I had decided to take the kids to the park, right opposite Deepa Academy on Thursday. And it sure was a wonderful idea. Not only did that one hour get the girls excited and happy but also this one hour with the kids at the park that day made me look at things differently.
These girls were already so mature, such little girls understood life in a way which probably many of us take a lot of time to and maybe some of us never even do get a chance to understand the life they do, throughout our life.

As soon as we left the academy for the park, amidst the squeals and excitement I noticed that the girls with partial vision had held hands of the ones who have severe problem. They didn’t need our help. They were set to go! And this attitude could be seen even during their play time. Silently they would help them find they way, play games, get on to swings and so on.


On Friday, the morning at Deepa Academy began at a hilarious note when one of the girls forgot her password of the G-Mail account she just had created a day earlier with us, leaving all the other girls in splits, trying their hand at guesses. The rest of time was basically spent in explaining them how to use a G-Mail account and why.


Same day, during the communication skills, we had planned to introduce the girls to the idea of drama. All of them were not really open to the idea of drama and didn’t even know much about it, hence their timid behaviour at the beginning of the class could be explained. But as the time passed by and they got the hang of it they seemed to be enjoying it thoroughly. What we did was switch roles in class and did a scene of how the communication skills class is. All this was done without a prepared script to give them an introduction to this concept. We do plan to do a prepared one in the coming week. Towards the end, while enacting Jayasi and me, the girls introduced some new games they all wanted to play and carried on with several rounds of the same game. It was amazing to see how they picked up the little things we say in class like “Smile” and “No talking in Kannada”( the latter changed to “No talking in Hindi “ :P ) and said it the way we did in regular course of the class. Also very wittily in the end, the girls playing our roles made the class speak on the topic we had given them a day earlier on which they all had to speak at least four lines at the end of the class. So that day the class wasn’t ended by us, it was effectively ended with the girls playing our roles and happily so.


It was a nice day with some of the girls, otherwise silent in the class, trying and making an effort to speak seeing their friends become the teachers for the day(even if it was just a little bit, it was a start! ) I hope they enjoyed the activity as much as we did.

2 comments:

  1. I keep getting amazed with the different ideas you implement in the Communication Skills class !
    Seriously, that's completely great !
    I'm sure the girls enjoy as much as you guys do, or maybe more :)

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