Pratham Mysore - A Children's Literacy Movement
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Pratham Mysore

Every Child In School and Learning Well...

Pratham Mysore services include Balawadis (nurseries) for pre-school children, Balasakhi, Langauge & Maths remedial programmes for slow learners and out of school children, bridge courses with accelerated techniques for older children. Libraries to sustain reading interests and seminar-series to ignite creative thinking in children lend further support to Pratham Mysore programmes.

True Education Programme

True Education is a concept based on "seminar series" with an objective to ignite the creative thinking of students and encourage them to ask questions. This concept was started by Dr. Bhamy V. Shenoy, Pratham Mysore trustee who introduced it in the village of Bantwal near Mangalore, Karnataka for 1st year degree students.

19 sessions for a group of 20 participants were held. Participation was limited in order to provide personal attention to all the participants. 15 minutes in each session was spent introducing the topic. Topics were of wide ranging interests and every participant had to either ask a question or comment on the topic. These sessions which were carried out for 7 weeks proved to be a huge success. Students who were hesitant to speak up before the sessions began were completely transformed, and by the end of the sessions, there was not enough time to respond to all their queries. These seminars encouraged the participants to think, comment and develop their own solutions for any problems.

Prompted by the success of this programme in Bantwal, Pratham Mysore in partnership with Software Paradigm (SPi) launched True Education for children of its Library programme. Children across grades 2-8 (7-15 yrs) from each of these libraries who want to learn more through interaction are encouraged to write down the subjects or questions of interest. These questions are then passed on to the area co-ordinators who in turn pool all questions from different libraries and pass it on to the voluneteers who will pick a topic for discussion during the weekend.

True Education sessions conducted by volunteer(s) on Saturday afternoons last for 1 ½ - 2 hours. These sessions consist of a group of 30 to 35 children handled by a team of 2 or 3 volunteers. Currently, there are 2 centres at Shanthinagar with 30 children each, one centre at Gousianagar with 20 children. Pratham's administrative office houses another center which is attended by about 25 children residing in adjacent areas. This programme will now be expanding to 15 centres to cover 500 children from government schools and communities put together.