SESSION: WRITING / DRAWING / NAMING

One of the sessions focused on the children writing and drawing different things with the letters in their own names. The group had begun thinking about the concepts of sound and phonetics. Several letters of the Hindi and English alphabets and their sounds (as they manifest on pronunciation) were easier to work with in Hindi. Oftentimes, a word in Hindi didn’t exist in English phonetically- such as न  से  नदी , (where the first letter of the word corresponds phonetically to the letter N in English) but नदी is ‘river’ in English (the R of the ‘river’ being phonetically disparate with its Hindi counterpart).

This was evidently a complex concept which required a lot of vocabulary-building on the part of the children. It also reflected a kind of lateral inversion for them which needed to be nurtured gradually. We tried explaining to them how the connections are established and how their confusions are a natural part of the process of inquiry. The exercise effectively enhanced their visual vocabulary where they started to tally objects around them with their phonetic counterparts.