Bookbinding, cont.

After observing the Acharya Narendra Deva Academy students beginning to tackle the work of story composition, a couple of things were clear. They were excited about the project, willing to work hard and open to sharing ideas with one another. Also, there was a wide range of English language skill levels. What the kids needed first was help with topic choice and some direction to guide peer collaboration. The language and editing work would come later. A wealth of possible mini-lessons were open to us, but given time constraints Tiffani and I decided to come up with a sample story of our own - something that would model a number of different composition techniques. It was monsoon season in Lucknow and we all had become used to sudden downpours and flooding on the streets so I drew on one of my adventures of the day before and came up with "Two Frightened Puppies".

I read the story. I had several students read the story. I had the kids tell me "what they had heard" and we talked a bit about the elements of good topic choice. The result was a big step forward in the kids composing techniques, although I found that now they began to lean toward "disaster"-type tales: falls, wounds, trips to the hospital ... Still, we were making real progress and, having observed some modeling of sharing and feedback techniques, by the end of the session several students were able to share their own stories-in-progress and receive feedback. I'm including several minutes of video of this lesson for those who are interested (excuse the unsophisticated sound and image quality).

NOTE: Possible technical difficulties with the video upload. I'm going to try again a bit later.

More to come on writing and bookmaking in Lucknow.

-Beth