Help create a Billion Literates!

Summer Holidays are fun for children – and it was no different for about 130 to 150 rural children who attended our annual 5-week Summer Program which concluded on 19^th May. OBLF conducts this program at a single centre for multiple reasons – First, children from scores of village schools gather in one place and get a chance to make new friends. All our rural Coordinators work together, providing them with a unique opportunity to observe and learn from each other and from their trainers and volunteers. For the children, it also means continuity in their knowledge of English and being constructively engaged while their parents are off to work, leaving them unsupervised. And this year, there was an added incentive – the Government of Karnataka provided mid-day meals during summer too!

Thanks to a few supporting Corporates, we had 4 Travel tempos picking up and dropping children safely from distant villages, to the Program venue daily. The children simply love this “school bus” experience, which is a novelty for them. Besides, our Program is all about learning with games, puzzles, activity cards, story-telling, songs, rhymes, craft, drawing, laptops, and Tablets, which makes it a whole lot of fun every minute of the time.  

It is for this reason that many of our ex-OBLF children keep returning to our Summer Program. OBLF runs its Program of teaching English only in Primary schools. But Kavya V, (as well as a few others), who was in our Program while at the Hale Chandapura Primary school, has attended our Summer Program every year, even though it is 3 years since she went to High School. And the results are there to see. This year Kavya appeared for her SSLC exams (the State Board exams for completing High School) and scored 95% in English and 93% overall.

Each such success story spurs us on to work harder to impact more lives.