The first few months of the Pehal initiative focused on putting the infrastructure in place: the classrooms, the playgrounds and most importantly, hiring enough teachers to cover the hundred-plus students at the school. Now that our bases are somewhat covered and each class has one teacher, our focus is shifting to the quality of education.

In October, 2022, we invited an alternative-educationist, Shashi Bala, to start a Learning Center for the children at Chamaru for the purpose of developing learning skills. Shashi has twenty-two years experience of working with alternative schools at Chandigarh, Navitaal, Coveda and The Olive Kid. Over the last few months she has started to work with the pre-primary and class 1 children, as well as kids from classes 4 & 5 as they will be moving to the middle-school soon.

It did not take Shashi too long to create a safe space and to establish a trusting bond with the children. The children adore Shashi Ma’am and look forward to her sessions. Through methods of playful-learning that she has learnt and devised over her years of experience with children, she has already brought a sense of ease into the learning space at Chamaru. We hope that this space will remain free from approval/disapproval, where children don’t feel fear or the need to people-please, are able to realize their potentials and open up to the joys and excitement of learning.

Through a wide variety of activities and games of observation, exploration, experimentation, imitation, imagination, expression, reflection, logical-thinking and communication, Shashi is slowly orienting the children to a friendly and creative way of learning. Allowing them to explore and develop their own strengths, both physical and mental, by engaging the vitality of their innate aptitudes, feel encouraged and get excited about learning as well as the vast world of possibilities that it can open for them.

Shashi began this process first through physical activities of playing, running, jumping, dancing and so on for the purposes of building physical strength, flexibility, balance etc, but more importantly to make play and freedom permissible and even, integral, to learning. She has now moved to the next levels of refining a) their motor skills through art activities that are helping them with not only expressing themselves but also with their handwriting, and b) their cognitive skills by introducing a variety of educational toys, most of them designed by Jodo Gyan that Shashi has considerable experience with. These games are designed to facilitate logical-thinking through mentally-engaging games of classifications, arrangements, comparisons and correspondences of and between numbers, images and words.

Gradually, out of the free and bold strokes that the children playfully started their art practice, abstract images are beginning to emerge to which they occasionally add a story, which is often a mix of their imagination and their reality. This, as well as their conversations and behaviors, is helping Shashi get a sense of their lives, relationships and their conditions, both personal and social. Shashi has now extended her hours to also spend time with some parents, mostly mothers, in order to engage them both for the sake of their child but also themselves, in order to build a trusting support system.

Concerning the children, Shashi has a few observations; of course, the children are mostly very bright and even over-enthusiastic about learning and trying out new things. Physically, she feels, they are way fitter than the urban kids. But what they need to work on most is patience; the children she feels are too excitable, thus, in order to make them quiet and bring some calm she has included meditation, where she makes the children sit quietly, turn their focus on themselves and identify their moods, feelings and agitations; she has also introduced a Listening Circle where kids converse patiently in groups of eights or tens. The Circle helps them with their communication and listening skills, and most importantly serves as a forum to address pro-social behaviors, address issues related to boundaries, respect, and also foster feelings of kindness, camaraderie and empathy.  

We are looking for contributions in cash or kind for the activities room.

We are also looking for books for the library, art and craft material as well as workbooks, musical instruments, and audio-visual equipment. But most of all we are looking for people to offer workshops! Please write to us at info@peheleducation.org in case you would like to volunteer to offer workshops or make contributions in cash or kind.