Shaping the Future
The COVID-19 virus caused arguably the largest global disruption of the education sector in decades. However, this was a sector that badly needed disrupting. The rapid growth of online schooling around the world has been driven by the continuing challenges of Covid-19 and the kids are the ones who have been affected quite much by it. However, digitalization was also made possible by spectacular developments in technology, which have allowed teachers to replicate and even enhance the best elements of a traditional classroom while also bringing to life new possibilities. The digital classroom enables top-quality education to be delivered to students anywhere in the world. One such school providing all the needful facilities to the preschoolers is – Doodle House.
Doodle House pre-school provides early education in a structured and organized environment to enable self-learning. The child–centric curriculum facilitates skill-based learning in an experiential set up for children from mixed age groups between 2-6 years. Through age-appropriate learning materials, we aim to maximize the child’s innate potential. While high importance is given for meaningful learning, the environment ensures holistic development of the child encompassing the areas of creativity, cognitive, sensorial, Math & Language. Doodle House is a 3-year-old preschool started in 2019, with an advantage to adapt to the changing scenarios in the field of education. Sustaining thus far with the support from the parents, students and staff & the ecosystem is a cohesive achievement for the school.
The unique differentiator is although being a Montessori there is specific focus to develop age- appropriate writing skills combined with activity-based learning, taking emotional, intellectual and personal abilities and needs into account. At Doodle House, the curriculum is integrated, interdisciplinary, artistic, and provides a quality early education program that stimulates the children to maximize their abilities, thus giving them a good quality foundation and bridging the gap between academic learning and life skills. Curriculum is the set of experiences, activities and events which occur in an environment specially planned to foster children’s learning and development. The curriculum is a comprehensive child-centric curriculum that comes with set objectives in all major areas of development. Moreover, the staff is trained to ensure that the curriculum objectives for each child are met consistently without creating any disturbance in the child’s work or thought process and are trained to facilitate learning, observing, recording and assessing daily. The school has an appropriate student-teacher ratio to ensure that every child’s needs and encourage them to learn independently.
Providing Happiness Quotient
“Our Pre-school is a friendly group where children aged between 2-6 and over can be left with qualified staff to learn and play together. We offer the child an opportunity to have fun, make new friends and develop sensory, social and communication skills through academic materials, rhymes, stories and thematic activities which are designed for their age.”, stated Subhashini Rajaram, Founder & Director of Doodle House.
Doodle House follows scientifically designed curriculum compliant with all respected Early Education
policies and programs globally and has a structured environment to enable effective learning with individual attention to each child. The preschool also uses child-proportionate and nontoxic learning materials, evaluates the child’s progress through periodic assessment of all areas of development, has intensively trained teachers on every aspect of the methodology with appropriate student-teacher ratio. “We have designed the preschool program and curriculum in such a way that it emphasizes individual attention and assesses the abilities and strengths of each child and present concepts as per. The beauty of the programme is each child is provided with a single learning tool at a time and allowed as much time as a child takes to master the concept”, stated Subhasini Rajaram, Founder and Director of Doodle House.
The virtual transition at Doodle House happened in phases where in the beginning of academic year 2020 the virtual sessions were everything but academics, an hour a day was spent only to interact with children, have small conversation, provide them a virtual friend, basically teachers becoming their virtual friends. Although, in the initial days the focus was only to set a new routine and accustom the children to the virtual world by initiating open discussions on generic day to day activities, what the children feel or going through thus ensuring their mental health is in check and easing them to adapt to the new normal. Furthermore, slowly the school introduced even the material-oriented learning concepts from their respective homes by suggesting alternative materials available at home, toy box etc to more complex learning.
Doodle House strongly believes in providing HQ i.e. Happiness Quotient among the children besides socio – emotional support, life skills and a strong educational foundation through easier and fun filled methods. The school keeps the children meaningfully engaged with various activities & real-life projects such as novel ways of introducing concepts & themes: Theme Transportation – a aerodrome was created, passports were issued to the children, currencies for respective countries and mini countries of Iceland, Amazon Forest, Sahara Desert were created thus introducing the concept “Weather”, Food & Nutrition: Growing food at school, each child planted a vegetable and nurtured it to see it growing and understand how food is grown, Life Cycle of animals/ butterfly Projects etc.
The curriculum at Doodle House is a comprehensive child-centric curriculum that comes with set objectives in all major areas of development. For a child below 6, curriculum comprises the environment which in turn means the tools that offer the child to learn. All areas of work for the child, both internal and external, have been planned with extreme care to facilitate self-learning, and implement the objectives set in the curriculum. Parents have been an integral part of the school curriculum. Having said that, Doodle House understood the pressure that parents were going through to keep up the routine and standards that a school environment would provide. Keeping these challenges in view, the school had provided a clear schedule and charter on day to day, weekly, monthly syllabus, activities that the school would follow. Also, instructions were specifically given to parents to set up a classroom space in their rooms, so the child understands the classroom environment and follows the routine. Parents involving children in certain fun activities, art & craft, science experiments only strengthened the parents – students – teachers bond.
Subhashini Rajaram, Founder and Director
Subhashini Rajaram is the founder & Director of Doodle House Pre -school, a passionate educator with a vision to imbibe more meaningful and fun based learning, a creative individual herself has observed in her experience the rhetoric ways of educational system and keen to bring about change at early stages of a child’s education, with this as vision the idea of Doodle House Pre-school started. “Hands on is minds on” is the mantra that school believes in, practices & preaches it too. Subhashini has a post graduate degree in Communication & is an NTT certified teacher herself. She has rich experience in Academia Relations in her corporate avatar for various leading MNC & start-ups.
