‘You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.’
These lines of the famous poet Khalil Gibran beautifully rather characteristically portray nurturing and shaping of AVM students through academic as well as co-curricular activities to make them competent and skilful. One such effort in the process was the recently held Inter House Verbal Intelligence Competition in the school, which was yet another way to strengthen their knowledge and content learnt in the classroom through relevant activities outside. Through carefully designed activities and word-games, students from grades one to ten were given opportunities to develop frankness and clarity in English language, speech fluency, extempore expressions and vocabulary.
The students of grade one were guided with rhyming activities to bring phonemic awareness (awareness of how to listen to, identify, and change around the sounds in spoken language). Their participation in rhyming words game not only trigger their oral language skills, at the same time, these phonics games lay the groundwork to reading and writing English.
Another amazing activity was designed for students of grade two which was all about sentence sequencing with pictures. This was a wonderful game for young kids to test and build their sentence-making skills. In this game, students were given a set of pictures and sentences describing these pictures. These second graders were asked to correctly match each picture with its describing sentence. This game helped students to get acquainted with appropriate sentence making.
Students of grade three enjoyed parts of speech activity through colourfully illustrated charts and visuals which prompted them for identification of different parts of speech. These games of parts of speech were cleverly disguised in the form of a challenging activity where students became aware about the appropriate use of different parts of speech.
Enthusiastic grade five students were engrossed in playing word games that challenged them to expand their vocabulary through cross word puzzles and word jumbles. These games were designed to test students’ vocabulary skills as well as to help them expand their word-knowledge.
The word-smart kids of grade six were made to master the art of matching and grouping the words which were related to a theme. This theme based vocabulary games were prepared by their English teachers to teach valuable strategies for word grouping and sentence formation based on different themes.
The mind-bending language game thrown to students of grades seventh and eighth was all about identification and unscrambling from well-blend sentences of two different languages – one vernacular and other in English. By involving enthusiastically in these exciting and engaging activities, students playfully learnt to manipulate their language-perception to apply it to understanding of other languages.
The most conspicuous part of this Verbal Intelligence Competition was the explosive exuberance and creativity during role-play activity for students of grades nine and ten. Observing these students melting down to such intricacies of appropriate gestures, witty dialogue and unique alternate value-based endings was a great experience for all English teachers. Students were given topics related to environmental issues on which they were asked to present skits. The plot, theme, dialogues and expressions were prepared by students in groups. This activity was meant to promote originality, provide a variety of supplies and experiences in which students can use their imagination and create. “Students produced humour as well as empathy through their presentation on burning issues which was very appealing” said one of the English teachers after the competition.
| Grade | Competition Name | Position | House |
| 1st & 2nd | Rhyming Words activity | 1 | Suhradam |
| 2 | Shivam | ||
| 3 | Sundaram | ||
| 3rd
|
Parts of Speech game | 1 | Shivam |
| 2 | Suhradam | ||
| 3 | Sundaram | ||
| 4th
|
Cross Word Puzzle | 1 | Satyam |
| 2 | Suhradam | ||
| 3 | Sundaram | ||
| 5th & 6th | Theme based Vocabulary | 1 | Satyam & Shivam |
| 2 | Sundaram | ||
| 3 | Suhradam | ||
| 7th & 8th | Word games (in Hindi/Gujarati&English) | 1 | Suhradam |
| 2 | Sundaram | ||
| 3 | Satyam | ||
| 9th & 10th
|
Role-play/Skit | 1 | Sundaram |
| 2 | Satyam | ||
| 3 | Shivam |
Seema Ma’am
