Dhrupad 11yrs old, He is like a river…flows in many different forms. His interest varies from origami, cooking, conducting quiz, sports, vehicles, adventure sports, reading, puzzles, movies, photography, and many more. He does not stay at one interest, he flows within the self-discovering self. He wants to create because he like inventions. Each learning story is interesting and demands a introspect in this whole system of education.
One of his story or learning to read and write-
He started his journey of English as a language when he was a few months old. We would read pictures with him. As he grew he would select loads of books before sleep for us to read no matter how tired we were. Sometimes selecting repetitive, sometimes new but no less than 7 books to read. We would sleep before him, he will wake us up to listen to stories. He would spend a lot of time with books. We never gave him formal training to learn the language. He started writing because he wanted to write ‘mummy, papa, and didi’. He wanted to write because he needed to write his name in many places. He still did not get any formal training to read and write. But he would listen a lot, since speaking in English was in the environment. He went to Jaipur and needed to understand Hindi to be able to communicate and understand Grandparents, he learned to understand the language of Hindi. At seven years of age, he was still not able to write or read by himself.
He needed to learn to read about ships to make his own ship models. He made friends with reading – he would read hoardings while traveling, he would observe other people reading, he would spend hours with books, he would ask the words to read. And he just started reading, He picked up Harry Potter at the age of nine.
He still will not write. He saw someone writing cursive, he liked the beauty of the script, he started practicing cursive. He practiced and practiced and wrote and wrote. He wrote what he wanted to write. At Aarohi he needed to write in many places – notes to write instructions to conduct sessions, notices to express his thinking, summary to make presentations, documentation to compile his week…he just started writing and now he writes pages and pages.
He shares, My family: we are a family of four. We love outdoor things. Like playing sports. We also like watching movies.Me: I like doing things related to fun play. I do things like. Spinning tops playing football photography etc.Learning: What we think is that anything is worth learning which takes care of the three mother codes care of me others and environmentlearn for my joy and growth. My family believes that we learn by doing. At my age we believe we should explore different things no matter what the world says about my future. I learn one thing for sometime and then i learn another thing because I want to learn something else. And sometimes I find it very very difficult to continue. I like learning by myself. And pears and traveling people. I like learning things that are not to easy or too difficult. When i am interested in something I do it. Aarohi is a place for doing different things.Our family values is to explore and if something is difficult we try in different ways and we learn from strange thing like movies. When we fail we learn from our failures. We make mistakes and when we reflect we learn.