Almost all of our girls when they join the Hope House, their understanding and knowledge of English is next to nil. We know that we cannot allow them to continue to grow up with the same level of understanding because English is a subject in school and of course as we know it, it is a global language and it wouldn't be easy if they have to succeed without English.
Knowing their limitation is one thing and having a strategy to help them to overcome is another thing. We do it the Hope House style.....fun way......more activity based with no consequences for failing and knowing fully well that they are in the same boat as others who have the same competencies or less if not more.
Knowing their limitation is one thing and having a strategy to help them to overcome is another thing. We do it the Hope House style.....fun way......more activity based with no consequences for failing and knowing fully well that they are in the same boat as others who have the same competencies or less if not more.
First, we lay the foundation using Phonics (we use hooked on phonics as you see in the image below)
(click on the image above to enlarge)
and then we introduce them to different things like little pictorial story books, Hollywood cartoon movies, English newspapers, email writing, participating in little newspaper competitions, and of course speaking with our residential German volunteers in English everyday. This goes on for the entire length of their stay in the Hope House.
If you're wondering about measuring of their learning, we have developed our own little tool that you see below:
(Click on the image above to enlarge)
What we do is this: Randomly we pick a newspaper article and make the student to read/ type it while we time for speed and measure for their errors (in reading and typing). We save this clipping on the child's name to use it for the future tests (child will not have access to this clipping to practice it) while these initial tests are being used as baseline.
As you can see from the above picture that Radhika - a 12th grader who was referred to the Hope House (when she was in 9th grade) by a Social Worker who couldn't bear to see the abject poverty that Radhika was living in and being engaged in child labor. At admission, her English depth and understanding was literally non-existent but today it is remarkable. She can write long emails with very few errors and can converse in English with relative ease. Because of this, her confidence has soared to touch the skies and she wants to become a nurse now - hands that were exploited for commercial purposes when she was a little girl are about to become hands that would save lives.
We take great pride in her transformation that we were able to play a small role in shaping this young lady's future but perhaps a generation may have been touched. It is this possibility that motivates us to reach out to more number of children like Radhika.
Come June, Radhika will move on to college to pursue nursing and we need your help. We are building a corpus fund to reach out to most deserving students to study job oriented professional courses so that they can get jobs immediately to support themselves and their families. Would you like Radhika with your gift of Rs. 250/-? Click here to make donation on GiveIndia site.
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