As we draw towards the end of yet another academic year, it is time to sit back and take stock.To think of the various activities, milestones, achievements and tasks of the year that has been.
We have indeed come a long way. From a humble
beginning, EDventure Academy is now a registered trust. ✌
Our
morning school reaches new heights. We have an eclectic mix of 29 kids grouped
into 5 classrooms – Sprouts, Buds, Flowers, Fruits and Harvest. We have 2
resource rooms (Twigs & Garden) for 1:1 coaching. Our team of 15 dedicated
special educators ensure that each child is nurtured to his/her full potential.
Our teacher student ratio of 1:3 takes care of the varying needs of each
student.
We
are proud to share that our “Fruits” class children are preparing for their
NIOS exams and that we have been successful in mainstreaming 3 of our younger
children namely Aniruddh, Harish and Kali, for the Academic year 2016-2017.
Five
of our kids from the Academic Year 2016-2017 have got admissions confirmed in
the mainstream school for the academic year 2017-2018.
sensitization of mainstream kids to accommodate special needs kids in their classroom.
Two
of our young Turks, Nikitha and Lizaba, are budding teachers.They have also
forayed into the bakery business making us very proud of their achievements.
Through our Evening Remedials program we are able to reach out to
another 30 children whereby we provide after school Special Education support.
Some of these children attend mainstream schools while others go to special
schools. We assess the gaps in their education and try to fill them. We start with
1:1 coaching and later move onto 1:3 as and when the child is ready. The
uniqueness of this program is that we open the available slots for this program
on a monthly basis and parents can choose as per their requirement and schedule
on a first come first served basis.
We have warmly welcomed many newcomers to our EDventure family who share
our philosophy of providing opportunities and training to every child
irrespective of the capability. So, we now have Ms. Achuta Nadapana who
conducts Art Based Therapy, Brain Gym by Ms. Anita E Abraham and Speech therapy
by Ms. Jiji Mathew. In addition, we have yoga sessions for our teachers, a
small play area for our kids to unwind, HR and PR consultants for better
management and an ever growing parent community who provide support to
different initiatives. The most loved of all is our little pup ”Cookie” - the
stress buster therapist.
To enable our parents to understand the specific needs of their
child and to empower them to better support their child, we organize a wide
variety of workshops in house where we invite various experts to speak or train
on the respective topics.This year we have successfully conducted workshops on
Avaz, Nutrition, Photography, Storytelling, Mendability, Dance & Movement, Biomedical
Treatment, Play Therapy for parents & Kids, ABA - Applied Behaviour
Analysis and Financial Planning.
We believe in holistic growth and experience based learning. It was with
this view that we organised various field trips for our students. This year
they were taken to aquarium, a nursery, a corporate office to experience the
corporate culture and also to a neighboring Dominos outlet.
In the month of November 2016 (like every year), we have participated in
Kalaangana. Kalaangana is an inter school cultural festival organized by
Information and Resource Centre (IRC), Bangalore with a focus on Special
children. Kalaangana was conceived with the objective of bringing out talents
and hidden abilities of special children through painting, dancing and singing
competitions. Our students participated in group and solo dances, instrumental
music, singing, painting and art based competitions. They won many accolades
and it greatly helped in motivating them to develop their potential in
social and learning activities. But most importantly, it helped address many
non academic issues like stage fright, stranger anxiety and adjustment to
unpredictable schedules.
We have inclusive Saturday competitions twice a month for children. This
brings in confidence, team spirit, friendship and fun in the children. It also
provides a platform to discover parallel talents. We had competitions on
cookery, flower arrangement, rangoli, fashion show, fancy dress, drawing,
music, singing to name a few.
In the summer we had also organised an inclusive summer camp where 30%
of the children were either siblings of our children or had been invited from
Kranti Organization in Mumbai. It was heartening to see all these children
having fun together in a relaxed environment and working on various subjects
like science experiments, art & craft, cooking and gardening .
Fun, festivities and celebrations should be a part of day to day life
and our children should have wholesome exposure to the different colours of
life. So we celebrated Friendship Day, Rakshabandhan, Krishna Janmashtami,
Onam, Teacher's Day, Children's Day, Christmas, Pongal, Ramzan and many more
occasions.
Our parents and teachers are our extended family and their continuous
involvement, support and encouragement helps us achieve better synergy in
working with the children. To foster this family spirit we organised various
interactions during the year - breakfast meet, Mommies Day Out, Teacher's Day
Out and the EDventure family picnic.
We held our annual carnival in the month of January to groom our young
entrepreneurs. This was a medley of food, fun, games, shopping that was
conceived, organised and managed by the children. The children held their forte
with great confidence. They raised Rs.10,000/- last year which was donated to
Kranti Organisation in Mumbai. This year, they raised Rs. 19,000/- and the
children themselves will decide as to who would be the beneficiary of their
hard work.
click on the link for more picture.
https://www.facebook.com/pg/edventure.academy/photos/?tab=album&album_id=834719253334416
In February, we had our Sports Day which was much bigger than the
previous years and was conducted in association with Stepping Stones School.
The children performed a drill and many indoor and outdoor games were
organised. To step up the social and emotional quotient, we had games like
relay race, passing the ball, musical chairs. We celebrated the
participation of Every child and hence everyone was declared a winner.
The children were happy to receive medals on the podium.
As part of our bigger vision to have a more inclusive, responsible and
empathetic society, we initiated different social awareness campaigns. In the
month of October, our parent volunteers started a Neighbourhood Awareness Drive
whereby we sensitised the neighbours to the functioning of our school. We were
pleasantly surprised by the warm responses. Awareness workshops about
understanding special children and accepting them were conducted at Ravindra
Bharathi Global School HSR Layout, Jubilee School, Mahatma Vidhyalaya,
Goverment school, Prafull Oorja Organization, at Infosys Campus in Electronics
City, etc to name few.
The hallmark of our efforts was the awareness Walkathon on World
Disability Day and the launch of the #Supporticon campaign. The #Supporticon
campaign is an initiative by EDventure Academy along with Spastics Society of
Karnataka in sensitizing the society towards children with special needs. One
of our set of parents, Mr Rathish P Subramaniam and Ms Geetha VM, were
instrumental in launching the campaign. The #Supporticon, a universal icon to
show support to a special friend, is a symbolic representation of any person
standing or sitting with a special needs child, leaning on each other's back to
show their support. So if you want to :)(: this cause, all you have to do is
befriend a special needs child in your locality, bond with him/her, then take a
picture back to back with your special friend and post it with the #supporticon
on facebook, twitter etc. to show your :)(:
Recognition
of honest efforts is always a great motivation. We experienced that
satisfaction when EDventure Academy was a finalist at the Indian Didactics
Awards, 2016. The IDA are the only internationally acclaimed awards for
facilitating excellence in Education products, resources and services.