This summer over the course of 12 days I had an amazing time volunteering in Lingshed Government School. And as I went through the pages of the program, day by day, they seemed to get better and better. But, as all pilots, the program had both its highs as well as lows.

During my stay, I think that the best thing about it was being able to interact with the children anytime. Every afternoon we would go down to the hostel and host a one-hour session of fun activities mixed with grammar. I feel that this enabled the students to feel more secure around us and helped in school when we asked them to create full sentences.

But I think that the books given in the program weren’t the best choices. A lot of them included very complex sentence structures for English learners as well as unnecessary words. A good option for different books as 17000 starts working on the Read Ladakh program would be Caldecott Medal books. They have simple sentences with words that are more important to learn. In addition to the Read Ladakh program we did KA-Lite with tablets funded by Project Nalanda. I thought that the program went really well and could be used by the class every week to practice skills that supplement their current math program. Overall it was a great experience.