Learning and having fun

Hi all

My name is Chintan. Glad that we now have a blog to share experiences with, and hence get to know, others who are part of Choice.

I am doing an internship with Spark India. It's a wonderful little organization based in Hyderabad. They publish and distribute books for children, and a special interest magazine called Teacher Plus. The project that I am closely associated with is the Teacher Resource Centre that Spark is in the process of setting up. The idea is to offer a friendly space for teachers, where they can look for interesting teaching-learning materials. That includes books, toys, films, and other kinds of material.

It feels great to be involved with this kind of work, especially because I have wanted to start my own library. I would like to teach and research in the area of education, and I enjoy interacting with kids. In the course of my internship, I've had the opportunity to meet and correspond with a range of interesting people and organisations. This has deepened my interest in education and children's literature. And I'm discovering that there's a whole lot of interesting work happening out there, which very few people know of. Karadi Tales, a Chennai-based company that produces audiobooks has come out with a compilation of poetry readings based on the poetry syllabus of Class IX-XII prescribed by the NCERT and CBSE. Then there's this tiny place called Jyotsna Prakashan in Mumbai. They've done some really nice translations of children's books that were originally written in Persian.

I also proofread a book called Teacher, written by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. It was first published in the UK, but since it is now in the public domain, Spark India is doing an Indian reprint. Enjoyed that. It's an autobiographical work by a teacher from New Zealand teaching in a Maori school.