Since September 2022, a group of volunteers has been conducting one-hour weekly interactive virtual sessions for the 9th-standard students of GKV. This was started as a pilot intending to offer this long-term, starting from lower grades, as a complement to the academic curriculum.
These sessions are conducted through Google meetings to help build spoken English skills and develop confidence in communication, articulation, asking questions and thinking differently for these students. The session’s content is non-academic and usually involves each student making one or more sentences in English through a structured activity. The class of 60 has been divided into 3 batches of 20 each, with 1-2 volunteers facilitating the session for each batch.
The feedback from the teachers and students has been positive. The teachers felt that the students had opened up to a large extent(in some cases more so than in classrooms) and looked forward to these sessions. The students found many sessions enjoyable and requested more than one weekly session. The volunteers have also enjoyed the sessions and found the children very eager and enthusiastic. As per the volunteers, the number of children who were hesitant to speak and express themselves has reduced significantly since the start of the sessions.
The sessions are now being conducted for the third consecutive year, starting June 2024. Through this initiative, we hope that in addition to doing well in academics, the students passing out of 10th grade will be at least as good in speaking and understanding English as children from cities schools.
