Teenager Ashu Singh could not grasp most English words till about a month back but after a recent summer camp, she reads English nursery rhymes to her siblings every night.
Aamna Parveen, a Class VI student, wants to become an English teacher. Even after being regular at school for six years, she could not read a simple English sentence till June. Now, she spends her free time reading fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood.
The girls' improvement has been a result of a special summer camp organised by the Bihar Education Project with support from Unicef and non-government organisation Pratham in June. A total of 15,000 camps were run across government schools in the state. At least 4 lakh children, including 50,000 girls, benefited from the month-long camps, which focused on English. A cadre of around 15,000 teachers was prepared for the camps and trained to teach the children in a manner that made learning fun.
Aamna (13) and several of her classmates have now started to spread their knowledge. She said: "I did not know reading could be such fun. Now, I am able to read small works of fiction and understand every word. My vocabulary is getting stronger. I want to become an English teacher and help students who do not understand English. I have also started reading stories to my parents and educating them."
Aamna's father Moin-ul Haque: "Children may stay on in school for years without actually learning to read or write too well."
Anjani Kumar Singh, the chief secretary and director of the Bihar Education Project, said: "The camps addressed all five indicators of education - access, enrolment, retention, equity and quality."
The students believe overcrowding in classrooms and tedious teaching style hamper their learning process.
Roshni, an 11-year-old, said: "My classroom is so crowded that students cannot fit in one room. We can hardly hear our teacher because everyone shouts all the time. Most of the time, we sit idle as there is no teacher. We do not even have an English teacher."
The state representative of Unicef, Bijaya Rajbhandari, said: "If children do not learn to read in their first three years of schooling, they might never have the basics of education. We aimed to educate all the girls of Bihar because they are often the first to drop out. Such students should be given a refresher verbal and numerical literacy course so that they do not drop out in the higher classes."
Ashu, 15, said: "Thanks to the assistance of the NGOs, I am finally able to read complex words such as entrepreneur, charismatic, superficial and obscure among others. I also help tutor my younger brother and sister so that they understand the basics from an early age and not suffer like me. I recite to them English nursery rhymes at night and they try to repeat it after me."
