Volunteers of Asha Chennai were invited for the independence day functions at the Sangamam Schools. Only I could attend these functions. I managed to visit three schools during this trip.

The independence day functions were organised a little later than usual (9:00 am instead of 8:00 am) because of some government order. So I was there early. I first went to Yelappanaidu Pettai. I could meet the Headmistress Mrs. Radha, the other government teacher and our Asha teacher Mrs. Prabhavathi. We have been supporting the school since last year. The school is well administered by the head mistress and the village leaders are also very supportive of the school. All the children were there but the function had not yet started. I interacted a little bit with the students. They then showed us the computers. Two of the computers had been fixed and were actively being used. We also gave the children some chocolates then we were on our way.

Then we went to Pattarai Perambudur. The head mistress and all the school teachers were present. The Asha teacher for this school (Deivanayaki) and Sailaja our computer teacher were also here. This is one of the earliest schools that we had started supporting in this project (from 2005). Because of the proximity to other private schools the school has been steadily loosing in strength. While we could not fault the government teachers for not doing enough, this is a broader problem that Asha Chennai needs to understand and find a suitable response for.

At Pattarai Perambudur, the Panchayat chief had to leave early and they had already hoisted the flag. We unfortunately couldnt participate in those functions. However the children were all assembled inside the school and I could interact with them. All the new text books were there in the school awaiting distribution to the children. This year this had been delayed because of the political fight sorrounding the Samacheer Kalvi (Uniform Syllabus) which the previous government had introduced and the new government is opposing. The teachers had to remove all references to Karunanidhi in the text books and make other corrections before distributing the books to the students. Here I spent some time interacting with the children. I was mostly talking to them about the computers and how they use them. The children basically knew the parts of the computer and how to use basic programs like Word, Excel and Paint. Here we distributed some educational and sports material for the school and chocolates for the children. The educational materials included pencils, eraser, scale, paper, crayons etc. These are used for the children. The sports materials include balls of various sizes, tennikoit rings etc.

We finally went to Thomur, a school we have newly added to our list of schools this year. The school headmistress, Mrs. Sumathi was taking BEd training and was therefore absent. Given her persistent request for Asha support, this absence was a little disappointing. They were just wrapping up the flag hoisting when we got there. The panchayat leader and other village leaders were there. The speeches of all the people started including one by me. Because of this I could not really interact with all the children. Here we distributed some educational and sports material for the school and chocolates for the children.

At Thomur we have newly added a teacher Ms. Gayathri. She seemed motivated and seemed capable as a teacher. The school had received about 8 laptops from the government. All of these were in good condition. They were being put to good use. Our Asha teacher, Gayathri, has some computer knowledge. She was teaching computers to primarily the 6th to 8th standard children. They had an eighth standard girl show us what she has been learning. What they were teaching her was no different from what we were teaching younger children (1st to 5th standards). I talked a little bit with Ms. Gayathri about how some more basic things regarding computers can be taught like the following,
	* how to find out the speed of the processor, memory etc. and what these mean.
	* various ways of launching programs by double clicking on a file type, by selecting a program from the start menu, from the desktop, from the quick launch menu etc.
	* advanced use of excel (like charts), powerpoint (like animations), word (like content page and other indices) etc.

I think as part of project Kanini we need to train some of the teachers all these concepts so that they can effectively teach these to the children. Some of this is already being plaanned for in project Kanini.

In Thomur also all the Samacheer Kalvi textbooks were waiting to be distributed. We once again gave some of the sports and learning materials to the school before we took our leave. After a coffee with Srinivasan (our coordinator at Project Sangamam) I headed back to Chennai.