Hindi Storytelling Sessions

The PYP Hindi classroom has been even more of a “happening place” this week and last week. This is due to the series of story sessions, for all the grade levels, facilitated by our guest speakers from the MBIS learning community.

These learning engagements were planned, in line with our current unit, under the transdisciplinary theme- ‘How we organize ourselves’ with a Central Idea of ‘Structure and patterns shape the language we use’. Working on the second and third lines of inquiry which revolve around interactions with others and learning language with contextual understanding, we used these sessions to explore and deepen our understanding of Hindi.

As our school community has a number of Hindi speakers, taking advantage of this fact, we conducted these sessions for our PYP Hindi students. Members from different sections of our community enthusiastically came forward to make this happen and provided enriching learning experiences for our Hindi learners. These storytelling sessions provided an excellent opportunity for the students to exercise their listening skills, as well as, make connections with their prior learning. They also tried to understand new words drawing on the context to support their word inquiry and vocabulary development.

The learning engagements gave the students an opportunity to interact, participate, inquire, reflect and make connections. This not only helped them to learn new vocabulary but also to understand and exercise the concepts of responsibility and connection.  They also had an opportunity to develop their social and communication skills as they interacted with familiar adults but now using Hindi not English and indeed with some adults they have not interacted with before!

After the sessions, the learners from the  individual grade levels expressed their gratitude by presenting a ‘Thank you card’ which they made on the spot for the guest speaker. During this card making activity, we saw students taking responsibility and working collaboratively utilizing the given time and space effectively in the class.