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.

Eureka Learning Center Training

Yesterday about 30 teachers from 8 districts in Tamil Nadu came to Chennai for Ready to Read program training. They will be each be teaching the program in Eureka Learning Centers in local government schools in their districts. We covered the first three weeks of content, activities, curriculum, and evaluation. While we still don't have all the materials to give to them, they each took a flip and blend book, sentence cards, sight word cards, the plastic polythene hangers fort he cards, copies of the flashcards and picture cards, the 1st week of the activity workbook, a list of activities and the evaluation tool. Many of them had already started the program and were able to give us some feedback. However, because they are all still new to the content, most of the feedback concetrated on classroom management and general teaching strategy. This will be something we need to cover more of in our subsequent training. More pictures from the training to follow.