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Allow them to bloom
Children enjoying their day out at Anweshana.
MANY PARENTS and educationists are excited about the potential of alternative systems that make school fun, and the Montessori system has been a long running player, never out of the reckoning, and a few staunch supporters gamely defend it and show in small ways that it can work too. And it is not toxic, and is so safe for children!
Anweshana, Montessori House of Children in HRBR Layout, is one place that was born out of a teacher's anguish over how the popular system reduces everything to its lowest common denominator.
Anweshana's founder, D.Bharati, was into NSS and social work for the joy of it when she was a schoolgirl in Chennai. Visiting an orphanage where she loved to spend time with the children, she got talking with a lame girl after setting them an exercise in dictation. The little girl had made a couple of mistakes. But Bharati, instead of marking it, had just let it be, just patting her for the correct answers, just as she had done for all the children. But only the lame girl asked her why she did not point out mistakes. That set Bharati thinking too, and she was soon convinced that being positive was a good way to be.
She got her calling then. Teaching, it was going to be. And then she got married and settled in Bangalore. When she scouted around for a good school for her son, she did find something she liked. She took the Montessori training course and before she knew it, she had started a little school with 12 children in 1993.
The school has 99 students now, and the pre-primary children get an early start on learning with fun as the way of teaching focuses on the sensitivity and extra-absorbent minds of infants that makes for greater retention.
A bit of botany, geography, geometry, and zoology, get ingrained in the child through the sensorial and language activities. The six-plus children work in small groups on many activities that use their imagination and intelligence. All this is meant to help the child work towards harmony — at the personal level, with the environment around her or him, and to the demands of life such as career choices, Bharati says.
Anweshana can be contacted over ph: 5452448 or 5456326.
By Alladi Jayasri
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Life
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