Mirra Charitable Trust conducted a workshop for teachers and parents of Tatva Pre-School, Velachery on July 19th 2014. Around 50 teachers and parents participated in the workshop.
The objective of the workshop was two-fold:
- Getting an understanding of differential needs of children
- Understanding how difficult and abstract it is for a child to learn concepts in Math and Language for the first time
The workshop started with experience in 6 corners on how it feels to be a child with perceptual difficulties or sensory issues. The teachers and parents were divided into 6 groups, each working on one of the 6 corners. The aim of the 6 corners was to get an experience on effort needed to focus and attend with distraction. It included:
- Joining dots and tracing way through a maze in front of a mirror
- Importance of experience for comprehension
- Learning place value in Math using new numeral system with different names
- Difficulties of a child with sensory overload
- Difficulties in decoding
- Looking for details in a very tensed and cluttered visual
This was followed by a discussion on how a child feels when new and abstract concepts are introduced. The workshop concluded with discussion on different strategies to understand the child’s needs and promote learning in an effective but joyful way. A series of workshops are being planned for Tatva focusing on various areas such as writing, emotional intelligence, reading, behavioral difficulties.