Behind the making of "Wow! What's that sound?"

In addition to interviews with the child artists, entertaining video snippets, bloopers and behind the scenes outtakes, this short documentary provides context into the reasons behind why we made "Wow! What's that sound?". And why we are hoping to turn it into a 12 episode educational DVD series as soon as we secure additional funding.

You can also view the documentary on vimeo in full screen.

Chennai ELCs Training #2

Last Thursday and Friday we held a training at the Chennai Block office for all the Chennai BRPs (Block Resource Persons). The Chennai BRPs are all running Spoken + Reading English programs at their schools. Thursday was focused on training them on spoken English content. And on Friday we focused on reading content.

The morning was spent doing a pre-test, learning the new reading jingle and reviewing how to do an evaluation. In the afternoon we split them into beginner and advanced groups. Each group was responsible for teaching one week of content and two activities to the rest of the group.



After lunch we spent the afternoon acting as students in a classroom while groups presented their content and taught us activities. Everyone took their student role very seriously and created a challenging (but very life-like) environment for the teachers. It was a fun and engaging way of covering lots of material and trying out new activities. Nobody was tired even though we had just eaten a big lunch.

We were finally able to give all the Chennai BRPs flashcards, picture cards, para cards and the first draft of the bilingual teacher's manual. The student activity workbooks will be sent to them next week. It's finally starting to feel like a complete program.

Materials Update #6: Flip and Blend Chart

Here are some pics of our materials that we've just gotten from the printers.

As students flip each page they can make new words by just changing 1-2 letters. Some of the words will be non-sensical, but the goal is to get them to start sounding out and reading words.


Sumangali is holding up a draft print out of two of our para cards. Parvathy is holding up the flip chart. The para card has a story about a cow on it, hence the reason why the flip chart says "moos".

Wall Alumni Service Award

An Exciting Announcement:

"Ready to Read" has been awarded the Wall Alumni Service Award from Grinnell College, USA.

The award will be used to:

• Design and print the Ready to Read Kit for schools. The kit includes: flashcards, picture cards, sight word cards, a graded reading library of 80 sentences, 32 paragraphs, and 32 stories, a blending flipchart, gameboards, a student activity book and a bilingual teacher's manual.
• Produce a supplementary DVD.
  
• Train and employ program staff.
• Support monitoring and evaluation of the program.

Within a few weeks we will be training local field staff and starting the program in 37 Eureka Learning Centers in 9 districts in Tamil Nadu. The initial reach of the program should extend to approximately 2220 students overall.

The Wall Alumni Award, in addition to AID and AIF fellowship funding will support this project through March of 2010. Please visit this blog often for project updates!

Thank you Grinnell College and the Wall Alumni Award Service Committee!

Stay Tuned!

New and improved: This blog is being revised and revamped to host the progress and developments of the "Ready to Read" Program. This reading program aims at providing primary-age students in Tamil Nadu's government schools tools to begin reading in English through a time-bound module.

More Coming Soon!