Shikshamitra: Open Learning & Education Resources

Please download our most recent Annual Report to know what we've been up to - and share!

shikshamitra-education.org

In March 2025, Shikshamitra formally closed our office. Shikshamitra continues officially on paper and we will continue to offer mentoring and consultations to all who need it or ask for it.

Our library books and versatile shelves on wheels have a new address at Kolotan School and the little soft boards we designed for the school a long time back are being used again -- wonderful recycling!

Friends at Bhabook are offering this Library Training course - contact them directly if you are interested.

Bhabook Foundation is proposing to offer a course for schools, NGOs, and educators already working with and/or interested in working with children’s libraries in schools and community
spaces. This course will be conducted with the support of organizations who are pioneers of the Library Educators Course in India. The proposed course by Bhabook is meant for interested
practitioners in West Bengal, as well as Odisha, Jharkhand, Assam and Tripura; it will be multilingual, with a focus on Bengali and other regional languages.

The target audience for the course are education practitioners who work in underserved, low-resource contexts, and may have limited exposure to the education domain formally. The course
actively encourages the participation of those who might not have strong academic skills, have only a 12th grade pass or may only be graduates and who belong to marginal socio-economic
groups, but are keen on working in the domain of children’s libraries in their existing organisations, communities and contexts.

The course differs from existing courses in its focus on learning through practice, strong mentoring support throughout the duration of the course, embedded peer-learning processes, and
handholding for a period after the completion of the course. The duration of the course is 8 months and comprises short contact periods (residential training in Kolkata) and more extended periods of practice with mentorship support. The team leading the course comprises key resource consultants from the domain of children’s libraries and children’s literature, established library
educators and trained library educator mentors.

Bhabook Foundation is reaching out to to elicit potential interest in being part of the above course. Please get in touch with Bhabook (See poster) if someone from your community/organization would like to join. Please share also!

Responsible Charity
Suchana Community
Tiljala SHED

Hello to all of our Friends -
Shikshamitra has slowed down a bit but we are still up and running! We are excited to announce a new Math Training Program that will take place in two 3-day phases. Please have a look through the information below and feel free to contact us if you have an interest. And please do us a favor and share this poster around if you know an educationist/parent/teacher who might be interested. We aim to make Math fun and approachable for children.
For more info, contact: [email protected] or Biswajit on 9830878138

We would like you all to view our updated website at https://shikshamitra-education.org/

When you scroll down to the TLM/Publications section you will find a FREE ACCESS section for some of the original Shikshamitra worksheets. We hope to include more worksheets here in future too. Please let us know if you download them and use in your classrooms or homes. Feedback is always appreciated.

Shikshamitra | Open Learning & Education Resource Center Shikshamitra has worked towards assimilating education with a larger vision of society, emphasizing creativity and equal respect for both humans and the natural environment.

Shikshamitra is now attending the Partners Forum organized by Wipro Foundation at the Azim Premji University campus in Bengaluru from 4-6 of December. The Forum is typically a residential gathering of all Wipro partners from across the country working in the school education space.

The theme of this year’s Forum is Capacity Building for and by Civil Society Organizations. Capacity building (CB) is an integral part of Wipro's work, to ensure that every child in the country gets access to quality education. Wipro believes that building its own capacities, and that of stakeholders, is central to this process. But what does enhancing capacities mean? Is it limited to organizing workshops or seminars that involve knowledge sharing, or are there other ways of doing this? Does CB involve changes in practice and mindsets? Does it need to be a deliberate activity? Or, can it be built into an organization's everyday processes? The 21st Partners’ Forum is exploring questions such as these and more through various small and large group discussions and sessions.

Because teaching-learning materials (TLMs) in classrooms is known to be as important as pedagogy and classroom management practices, Shikshamitra is showing an array of its publications and TLMs, which have been designed to engage different senses of the child and to increase their interest and attention to what is being transacted in the classroom.

Please write to us if you would like us to send you a copy of our updated TLM & Publications catalog: [email protected]

Lamprini celebrated the successful completion of the 2024 Hospitality Training on Friday. Five women walked away with hard skills in math, English, baking, and computers. But more importantly they grew in self confidence, agency, and the ability to see themselves as worthy and capable. May they continue to grow and bloom 🌸🌼🌸

Shikshamitra has been proud to partner with Lamprini through its tailor-made Lifeskills Development Course which Biswajit worked hard to create and execute with full attention to all of the women's specific needs for learning.

This is a joyous success! We so enjoyed being part of this training program. Please support their work by tasting their delicious products!
https://www.instagram.com/lamprinibakery/
They use the best ingredients for their granolas and baked goods.

Shikshamitra conducted a 3-day workshop (29-31 August, 2024) with the teachers of the Child Activity Centres supported by CRY (Child Relief and You). CRY has been supporting and running 7 CAC centres in and around Kolkata. After an initial assessment, the children are enrolled in one of the seven Centres, where they receive tailored remedial classes designed to meet their specific learning needs. The curriculum is aligned with government school standards to ensure that children are prepared for mainstream education.

CRY approached Shikshamitra for the training of their teachers in the following areas:

ASSESSMENT
1. Baseline: To help teachers learn to identify and understand learning gaps among children.
2. Continuous Cumulative Evaluation: to learn to regularly assess children's progress in learning.

PEDAGOGY
1. Meaningful classroom transactions: To help teachers learn the fundamentals of constructive classroom transactions and to enhance teacher capabilities when it comes to engaging children using the children’s own world as a bridge to learning.
2. Conceptual Clarity: To strengthen in-depth understanding of teachers on core subjects such as Languages (Bangla and English) and Maths using appropriate teaching learning materials, all of which are developed by Shikshamitra.
3. Lesson planning: To learn how to plan lessons effectively using a format prior to every classroom session.

It was certainly a challenge to accommodate all these learning areas, and to choose the appropriate materials, in the span of three days, however it went well. Although Shikshamitra does not usually conduct such ultra-short assignments, we tried our best to do the material justice and cover the chief learning points!
The workshop was very interactive and inclusive and many excellent questions arose which became the basis for more learning. Thank you to everyone involved in organizing the workshop and to all of the participants.

Day 5 concluded our teacher training session with Wipro Foundation partners. It was a very successful time with many learnings and sharings. Now, teachers must go back and plan to implement all that they have taken in!

This last day of Shikshamitra's training program included a closer look at our Comprehension materials and taking questions from participants. After our tea break, we did a wonderful sum-up of all the concepts learned so far and revised any areas that are not clear for the teachers. After lunch, the participants performed the incredibly creative songs which were part of the homework assignment give on Day 3. We then did a music with art meditation asking people to sit with their eyes closed and come up one by one to express their feelings on cloth. It was finally time to distribute the certificates and enjoy some kathi rolls and chop!

On Day 4, we began to near the end of our 5-day long training sessions. Participants shared their homework and Sudeshna began with an introduction on how to introduce and teach TENSES: a review of simple present and moving into Present continuous, the Past, and the Future. Games with flashcards and movements were incorporated. The group did an art activity where they depicted scenes from their own lives in past, present and future. The last part of this artwork was to place a photograph of themselves onto the piece. The results were just amazing and we all got to know one another a bit more deeply when discussing what they had painted. After lunch, Sudeshna introduced the final topic of the course: Comprehension. She armed the teachers with a method for getting children to internalize any story and be able to talk about and write about it.

We concluded Day 3 of Shikshamitra's Accelerated English integrated with Art and Music course in conjunction with Wipro Foundation partner organizations. The day was very full and covered English teaching concepts like singular-plural, has-have, possessive pronouns, and the "be" verb creating sentences, using worksheets and playing games. We talked about the reasons we bring art & music into a classroom and taught art exercises to build children's power of observation and confidence in expressing what they see around them. The day ended with much energy doing more musical games.