COGNITIVE STIMULATION
SIP focuses on young children in the 3 years to 6 years age range and the parents and care takers of these children, including pre-school teachers. SIP offers high quality early childhood care with a view to providing skills and tools to facilitate the cognitive stimulation of children in this age range. Through an activity-based curriculum SIP addresses holistic development that is culturally appropriate and focused on preserving children’s multilingual identities.
THE PROMISE PRE-SCHOOL
Since the mid-1990s up until 2011, we ran a Shishu Kendra (pre-school) for children from urban slums as one of our direct interventions under the SIP wing of of our work.
Appriximately 10 batches of children and families have passed through our SIP programme. We also have developed relationships and trained teachers in primary schools in the area and recommed our students to these schools.
The SIP pre-school model has been extended to a number of contexts through partnerships with other organisations as extension projects, both in India and in other developing countries.
CURRICULUM
One of the key features of our pre-school curriculum is that we take an interdisciplinary approach. We do not follow any one school of early childhoom education, but have created a strong curriculum that draws upon the ideas of others in the field as well as upon principles from child psychology and human development.
Another aspect of our approach, is that we focus strongly on the use of low-cost or no-cost material that is contextually available. We also draw parents and adults into the programme both to sharpen their awareness about what they can do at home to continue the child's development as well as including them as a part of the teaching learning process. Including grandparents as story tellers is a particulary important method we use to contribute to the child's connectedness with his/her history and culture.
SHIFT IN FOCUS
Pre-school education has now become a branded, corporatised "product" and parents tend to be carried away by the characteristics of the brand! Also, with corporatisation, existing, culturally embedded habits linked to early childhood stimulation were being rapidly eroded and replaced with urban centric, Western ideas. This became all the more clear to us when we shifted our campus from urban Bangalore (Koramangala) to a semi-rural area (Sarjapura). Here our experiences showed us that the need was not for a pre-school. Instead the felt need was for community based interventions, that would continue to support the entire family for the early childhood education of their pre-school aged children. This need was particularly sharp in semi-rural and rural areas since many of these children are first generation learners and the home literacy environment did not adequately support the optimal develpoment of their early learning foundations.
Hence our SIP work now focuses on community based interventions such mobile toy and book libraries and workshops for parents and caretakers. The tabs above provide further information about these approaches.
