24 Oct 2021,

Dear Parents,

This is the last newsletter of this semester. Hope we were able to justify the cause of writing these weekly recaps to you, by giving you a peek of everything that is happening in LC. This was the most eventful week of the semester. Let’s see what happened.

Review Meetings

These meetings are especially rewarding for us facilitators. It is the finale of the semester. It's an opportunity to meet with the parents and really understand what is going on in their minds. What are their anxieties and insecurities? Essentially speaking, this meeting is the backbone of a self directed education. From here starts the journey of the child who is on a path that she/he has to discover and explore. We as adults are mere supporters and witnesses of their beautiful journey.

We also realised some of the parents share the same kind of worries and anxieties. We were thinking about how to address them from time to time. One way could be to carve out a time once in a month where you can come and meet with us to discuss. Or maybe we could have a dedicated meetup with all the parents to address this. Let us know what you think.

Project Day

It went very smoothly this time. We could observe that kids are getting a hang of it. Special thanks to Uday, Santosh and Rushabh for patiently listening and giving their feedback to children. The topics of presentations were Snow animals, Fibonacci series, Red slider turtles, Bermuda triangle, Currency, Solar system, Hand ball, Abacus, Parrot fish, Thief, Electric Cars, Rockets, Trees, Ranks in Indian Army and Extinct animals.

We saw a lot of improvement in a few kids. Some of the kids during the final circle time realised that they need to improve and their performance this time was not upto the mark. Kids also encouraged their friends and said whose they liked the best. So there was self assessment and also peer assessment here. Looking at this we feel very sure that this is something we would like to keep doing in future.

Preparations for the event

Frankly speaking, by wednesday we had no idea what was going to become of the drama. The whole script for the drama had about twenty characters for want of including each and everyone’s idea into the story. Everyone was the director. This was a perfect example of using the line, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”. If you couldn’t appease the other person then they might just walk away leaving a gaping hole in your story. We told elder ones to pull up their socks or we might have to drop the drama altogether. So they scrambled to produce what you saw on saturday.

We thought the dances were a saving grace. So we put them in the beginning to create a good impression…:) Just like every time, we welcome such fiascos. These give us an opportunity to debate, reflect and learn from our mistakes. It's fun to see when kids realise by themselves in hindsight what we were anticipating is going to happen. In today’s reflection sessions kids admitted that there was lack of planning for the drama. They openly gave critical reviews about themselves and others’ performances. Now we have a to-do list ready for how to do it the next time.

Let’s समझते हैं

The celebrations turned out to be really nice. It was great to have met all of you and your family. Slowly we can see that LC is becoming an extension of our home and our family. And indeed it's a great feeling. But this event is also the culmination of our whole semester. Just like the event, the whole semester turned out to be awesome. First of all we had lots of newcomers, Pinki as facilitator, Jayani, Jinaya, Loguss, Taapsii and Anay. All of them have added a wonderful flavour to our mix.

We also were able to do some activities we couldn’t previously do, like our trip to Mokhada, trek to Karnala, monthly project presentations, LC Times, etc. This was also the semester where there weren't any consequences given to kids by other kids, except for the last day. That doesn’t mean all was nice and hunky dory, that is a chapter long pending that needs to be discussed. We had some wonderful sessions this time, overall kids were attending them wilfully and were very engaged. Out of the few things that didn't fly this semester was writing the log book. We thought it would be good to keep a record of different things that kids are doing, which otherwise would be difficult to remember as years pass. But they found it taxing to write at the end of every week. I don’t think it's the act of writing they hate, but this idea of systematic record keeping looked boring to them. We will have to think of some other means now.

Fees

This is just a reminder to split up the amount of the earlier requested fees of Rs. 50,000 into Rs. 35,000 to be paid by the end of this month and the rest Rs. 15,000 to be paid in Jan 22.

Food for thought

There is some homework for you guys and we would like to share this youtube video by Alfie Kohn who is an author of many books on parenting. Here’s a video where he talks about adolescence and autonomy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3T8pFxIeyY

That’s it for now. Happy Diwali and have a wonderful time with your family. Stay healthy and stay safe.

See you all on 8th Nov...