Week 4 at blockClasses

Every week we have gotten closer to our blockkers! It's so satisfying to see how these children are not wasting their time while sitting in front of the computer or TV rather learning about healthy foods while they play a game of snake and ladders.

Week 1 at blockClasses

So, finally the week 1 at blockClasses was over. It was a fabulous week -- the curiosity, comraderie and love that we observed in the first batch of blockClasses has been just tremendous. We are capturing a lot of data about all the activities that we are doing and will see after the program; how much impact blockClasses has on the very first batch. In short! everyone is just having a ball in the blockClasses and learning a lot doing the same :).

buildingBlocks launches India's first afterschool program

buildingBlocks, a first of it's kind Research organization in the field of Primary and Elementary Education, has launched India's first afterschool program (blockClasses). The program is an outcome of months of research, countless hours of discussion with eminent educationists, analysis and re-analysis of urban Indian neighborhoods, countless hours of brainstorming amongst the Research team, a lot of commitment and most importantly the uncompromising passion to create a NEW India.

The program is getting launched this summer, as a introductory summer workshop at Bharti Public School, Swasthya Vihar. In case if you are interested to know more about the program, kindly register for the introduction seminar in second week of May.

Finally, we are extremely thankful to our team to spend so much time in making all of this possible.

Why not blogging?

Actually, our team has been neck deep with work. The curriculum desing team is working hard on the curriculum to make it the most beautiful and scientifically proven curriculum for all the blockers (children as we lovingly call them) who join blockClasses. The training team is working hard to ensure that our instructors are not only qualified and most eligible but also compassionate individuals as well. The promotional team is working hard to get all things 'right' as far as reaching out to the audience is concerned.

The imom team is working hard on giving shape and direction to imom. And, one of them is busy writing his exams. So, all in all we are very busy right now but we love the school blog and will be back soon.

Environmental Awareness!

How can you make children environmentally aware without putting him/her to sleep?
Let us know -- because sum of minds is always greater than a single mind.

Rain Water Harvesting - II

The other day when we raised the question of rain water harvesting on theSchoolBlog, we got some great suggestions from Pudi, a concerned reader based out of Hyderabad (You can read more about his blog over here). Pudi had created a comic strip to stimulate the thoughts of children about Rain Water Harvesting.

We used this comic strip to create a video to incite the sparks of curiosity about rain water harvesting in our class. We actually showed it to one of the Delhi based educators and she liked the idea behind this kind of usage of ICT tools. However, the real litmus test would be when we play this with children and assess if this has any impact. You can also watch it below:

What makes a parachute to float in the air?

While thinking about the experiential curriculum for these young ones, one exciting project that came to my mind was the idea of a parachute.

I am aware of the concept of parachutes and how it works -- however, am confused how would a 7 year old would understand it? If you have any suggestions please write back.

Rain Water Harvesting?

So a follow-up to the yesterday's post:

How would you teach the concept of rain water harvesting to a 7 year old? or do you need to teach this concept to the child's parents?

Let's see if the viewers have an interesting take on this. BTW, these are few of the concepts that would be part of our soon to be launched block Classes -- so let's brainstorm so that the children of tomorrow are the most enlightened, courageous and thoughtful that India has ever produced :).

Children need to know!

While working at the activity aspects of our experiential curriculum, I came up with an idea for theSchoolBlog. Our focus for block Classes (an afterschool product by buildingBlocks) is absolutely on stress free, experiential based learning. So, we are innovating on how we can excite children to understand/engage with day to day scientific phenomenon.

I thought -- may be we can use this incredible power of internet to come up with innovative ways to think about how can we introduce these concepts in the blockClasses?

The first in the series of the several concepts is why can't humans fly? In case if you have an answer which can be understood by 6 year old -- please post it on the comments section. It will be interesting to see how the top-notch schools (DPS, Modern, SPV etc) introduce this concept -- in case if you have an idea.