Brindavan Tent School Transformation Story In Pictures & Videos (Don’t Miss The Infographic At The End!)

Transforming a school is an ambitious project, and as you know, we began working with one last year, and have been sharing the happy story through our blog posts. The Brindavan Tent School offered us the freedom and opportunity to get our creative juices flowing. They also helped make our dream of offering a healthy education for the kids a reality. We’ve written about it enough, and you already know about the different activities and milestones we have achieved in this school. But we also wanted to give you a rundown of our progress with some visuals. 🙂

The Journey Begins With A Bang

Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

Soon after that, we realised that we needed to tackle the health, hygiene and attendance issues in school. We started off by educating the kids about the importance of cleanliness – keeping themselves and their surroundings clean through interactive games and activities. We talked to them about how unclean environments attract germs, and how germs cause diseases, which translates to missing school! We conducted a Volunesia circle (a community Saturday event), dedicated to creating beautiful decorated dustbins out of carton boxes and waste materials, which the kids started using in their classrooms and also took home.

This effort soon translated into the kids turning up at school every day, wearing clean clothes, combing their hair, washing hands before eating, drinking water only from their assigned water bottles, and being neat and tidy in general.

Tarkeybein Basic English Curriculum Introduced

Based on our initial assessment of all the kids, we realised that most of the students (1st to 4th grade) were not comfortable identifying English alphabets. We realised that we needed to start from scratch, and collaborated with our friends at Tarkeybein to introduce their basic English curriculum in school. Akanksha, the founder, came down to the tent school to train the teachers and take a few classes until the teacher became accustomed to the teaching style! The aim was to help the kids learn the alphabet by connecting to the patterns and sounds, rather than by rote-learning. We wanted them to eventually be able to put sounds together to make words and have the confidence to read easily.

The Spirit Of Volunteerism At Its Best!

With the initial curriculum in place, the next humongous task on our list was the cosmetic transformation of the school. The classrooms were dingy and dark, the paint was old and dull, the floor was uneven and cracked, and the toilets always stunk! We put the word out that we were looking to solve these issues and needed help. Within a couple of months, some local volunteer groups stepped up and took charge!

While one of our volunteers, Preethi, took up the massive task of raising funds to paint the school, the Seva Smile Cafe volunteers came into school on consecutive weekends and painted the interiors and exteriors with bright colors and education-related designs! At the same time, the Sathsang Foundation folks sponsored the revamping of the floor of the school and beautiful clean white tiles were installed.

Today, Brindavan Tent School is a favorite selfie spot in the community, thanks to the love and efforts put in by more than 300 volunteers, joining hands to set the stage for the kids!

Growings Wings And Flying To The Airport

As a part of the Daan Utsav week of giving, we got the opportunity to take our kids to see the airport, and we jumped at the chance to take them on their first trip! They ooh-ed and aah-ed at every little thing on the way to the airport including the push-back chairs and curtains inside the hired bus. So, we knew they would be thrilled when they actually saw an airplane! The idea was to expose the students to different experiences, broaden their minds, and allow them to dream.

At the end of the trip, every student either wanted to be a pilot or flight attendant, or airport manager! Who knows, one of them might just become one!

A Digital Tent School Is Born!

Thanks to a kind donation from Team Goavega, we introduced a tab and a projector to tent school! This move not just gave us the ability to use digitized content in the class, but it also allowed us to expose the kids to the world of cartoons, educational movies, the solar system, and much more. Fueling imaginations and increasing their appetite for curiosity became exponentially easy and interesting!

It was wonderful to see how the kids (who don’t understand English) told us the summary of an English animated movie. We were surprised at how much they got right! Hardly anything was lost in interpretation, which was a beautiful learning for us. It showed us what a big role digital visual content can play in classrooms even with language barriers between teachers and students! We had bridged one more gap in this school successfully with this move. 🙂

Beautiful Results After A Year Of Student Intervention In Tent School 

After a year of engaging workshops, field trips and weekend Volunesias (weekend community events where volunteers from the community interact with students during pre-planned fun and engaging activities – creating a beautiful combination of teaching, learning and service), it was time for the endline assessment of the kids. The resulting graphs were a great source of joy! Take a look for yourself:

Kids who once had so much trouble identifying alphabets were now trying to read every signboard on the street and whole story books! The teacher was proud, not only of how her students had progressed over the year, but of her own teaching journey as well. The training went so well that she was able to improvise her own teaching methodologies and the difference in her approach was striking! 🙂

Here’s a 2-minute video showcasing our journey!

Celebrating The Success Stories Of Our Little Champs At Their First Annual Day

To celebrate the transformation in our kids and the school, we decided to organize a fabulous Annual Day. We distributed some appreciation cards and goodies to kids, followed by energized performances by the students themselves. Then renowned singer, Vasu Dixit, graced the event as our Chief Guest and treated everyone to some beautiful songs. Soon after that the classroom turned into a dance floor when the Bhoole Bisre Geet team had the kids, teachers, volunteers and guests grooving to their tunes. The exhausted kids and adults were later treated to some delicious volunteer-cooked food by the team of Seva Smile Cafe!

Tent School Transformation Effort Recognised By Bangalore Mirror

What goes around comes back around! This is so true for our tent school story. The journey began with Deepthi Sanjiv writing about our intention to launch Mentor India (our student intervention program) in tent school, and we ended the year with yet another article talking about the transformation!

To show you how our intervention in the school actually made a difference and a lasting impact, we prepared a short storyline infographic. Take a look!

The journey to transforming the Brindavan Tent School has been a massive learning experience for us at KnowYourStar. The way our community came together to aid us was nothing less than a miracle! From strangers, well wishers to neighbors – the way you have all supported us has made everything possible. The transformation of this school has only begun. This year of success has been great, but this is just the beginning! We have more programs in pipeline for the next academic year, and are very confident that you will continue to be our backbone. 🙂

Enjoyed reading about this? Then you might like to read KYS Retreat – Creating New Milestones For Ourselves In 2018

If there’s a story that needs to be told, we are ready to tell it. Write to us at contact@knowyourstar.com with your story lead, or contact us on Facebook or Twitter.

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