Materials Update #5: Teacher Pic

Our revised and much improved 'teacher' picture.

Materials Update #4: Editing

With over 360 images, it has been a challenge to keep track of all our requests, the changes and the final images, although we have managed to keep it pretty well sorted. And our illustrators have been very patient with us and all our demands. Today I was going through the picture cards for a final edit to make sure there were no glaring errors--spelling, the wrong picture with the wrong word, etc. I thought we had finalized all the images, but for the word "teacher" this is what I found:



Eek! This is exactly the image of a 'teacher' we are trying to avoid. In our instructions to the illustrator we said that the teacher SHOULD NOT have a cane. But perhaps she misread it and thought it said 'should have a cane.' And for some reason this image didn't get sent to us in the initial preview, otherwise I'm sure we would have caught it. The last thing we want to do is promote the image of the teacher as having a cane and looking as if she is ready to beat a child. That may be a reality in many schools, but should not be reflecting in our materials. But it is comical that something like this almost got through. This just means we need to look at everything with a very fine tooth comb!

Materials Update #3: Printing

Good news! We have material. Our blending flip chart just arrived (pictures to be posted soon). The tool itself turned out pretty well. Several people in the office have already sat and started playing with it blending the different sounds together to make sensical and non-sensical words. However, the black ink quality isn't great and there are some smudges in places. We are going to complain to the printer, but now that we have already printed 500 there probably isn't much we can do.

Our sight word cards and sentences cards have also arrived. And while I haven't seen the final product, I'm told they look good.

Brief Hiatus--Back from the Himalayas

I've just returned from a 2 week hiatus in the mountains. The first week I was in Shimla saying good-bye to the 2008-2009 Clinton fellowship class. Soon I'll be welcoming the 2009-2010 class at orientation in September as I have extended my fellowship. The second week I was in Leh, Ladakh celebrating my transition from fellowship to fellowship thanks to the Wall Alumni Grant. It was a fabulous and much needed break from the office, the heat and the daily grind. Plus I got to wear socks and a hat while exploring the absolutely stunning mountain desert scenary. Although it was so dry up there that my skin was aching to get back to the humidity of Chennai. And my stomach was dying for some fresh curd after a possible bout with giardia. I'm back in the swing of things and our materials are starting to come back from the printers. FINALLY!

Materials Update #2: Printing

With more than a few delays and bumps in the road, we have finally sent 3 things to be printed: 160 sight word cards, 64 sentence cards and the flipchart. We are printing 500 of each, so we are still waiting to get price quotes from different printers, but the materials have been finalized and they are on there way. Hopefully within a week we will be able to see and hold a final product! What an exciting moment that will be when this project finally begins to materialize!

The title page of our "flip and blend" phonetic blending flipchart. Illustrations were done by Luckshmi and the design was done by RJ, an intern from McGill University.

Materials Update #1: Illustrations

In order to get all our materials ready to be printed we need two things 1) content and 2) illustrations. Most of our content is complete, although it's in constant revision. But the biggest piece has been contracting out illustrations for this project. Not only do the illustrations have to be simple and bold, they have to be culturally relevant and appropriate for rural primary children in India. Currently we are working with five illustrators. We have collected 242 illustrations, but we still need 80+. We are desperately waiting for our illustrators to make corrections, send us sketches for approval and finally send us final images. It has been a really fun process thinking about what images we want to use to teach certain sounds or groups of sounds. And it has been really fun seeing what the illustrators send back to us. We are working with some very creative people. Here are a few examples of what our materials will look like and include:

"This pig has pants." This is the image on the 'p' flashcard.

"A rabbit rides a rocket." This is the image on the 'r' flashcard.

Solution #1: Alternative DVD Production Companies

With the news that our DVD production company was backing out, we swung into high gear and found two other alternatives. We met with them last week to discuss our concept and have submitted samples of our content. They will each write up a proposal and submit a budget by the end of this week. Let's hope our initial budget is within range of these new proposals. Both have different strengths to offer the project 1) is production focused 2) is education and multi-media focused. I'm secretly hoping that there is a way to bring them both into the project. Hopefully we will be able to make a decision and get a signed contract within a week.