- What went in
- Reading Room website in English and Malayalam, prepared re-cap slides, a laptop, internet access, Google Meet and WhatsApp.
- Outside help
- The school coordinator introduced the plan, created the WhatsApp group and informed families.
We have been reading Roald Dahl’s "Matilda" with Standard 7 students at SDPY Girls High School. We help them understand the story and feel comfortable sharing ideas. Since our last session in September, we have been trying to keep reading together. Youth festivals, fairs and other preparations took up the reading period. We agreed with the school to move online.
The school coordinator explained the plan in class, created a parents' WhatsApp group and informed families. We shared short weekly activities, including story recaps, English and Malayalam vocabulary, and reading and listening tasks. We did not receive responses, so we tried another approach. We offered weekly online sessions on Saturdays at 8 p.m.
To support these sessions, we created the Reading Room. It is our first mobile-friendly reading website built with AI support. It offered word meanings, questions and creative activities in English and Malayalam. Students could complete these after each session so we could check their understanding.
We planned our first online meeting as a chance to reconnect, revisit the story and explore the website together. But when the time came, the students did not join. It was disappointing. We had prepared a way to continue, but we still needed to understand whether it worked for families.
We plan to meet the school coordinator to hear suggestions. We will ask the coordinator to gather feedback from students and families. Together, we will explore what could work, including reading before or after school.
The school coordinator helped explain the move online, but we had not confirmed whether the timing and format worked for families. The lack of responses and attendance needs further exploration. It does not necessarily mean a lack of interest. Before another session, we will ask the school to gather feedback from students and families about access, timing and support. This will help us decide together whether online, face-to-face or a combination would work better.
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