Our Class Magazine

Along with my co-teacher, Ms. Anusha Raturi, I taught a set of 40 children in 4th standard during the 2013-14 academic year at St. Francis High School in Pune, India. The Teach For India fellowship requires fellows to work with the same set of students for two years; thus, I moved up with my children and was their class teacher in 5th standard as well. I did not have a co-teacher during my second year of teaching.

One of our culminating projects that my students expressed an interest in was to design and write a class magazine that illustrated different experiences during our two years together. This class magazine was entirely managed by the students - they wrote the pieces, created the art work, chose the photographs/pictures, worked in teams to design the pages and typed out the pieces on my laptop. As a teacher, I assigned students to teams based on their interests and skills, provided materials and resources and printed out copies of the final magazine for each child.

Cover page of the class magazine - the photograph at the top is a picture of our classroom in 4th standard while the photograph at the bottom was taken on the last day of formal classes.

The final versions of the pages in the magazine were designed by the children on sheets bought at Papertells, a handmade paper factory in Pune that our class visited on a field trip (another post on this blog talks more about the field trip). This is why the above image has the textured background of handmade paper!

The posts in this section of the blog are snapshots of some of the pages designed by my students and exemplify respect and teamwork that were core values of our classroom. The posts are arranged in chronological order - the first four being from 4th standard and the last four taken from 5th standard. There is a link to the next post at the bottom of each post.

Lastly, it is instructive to note that my children spoke Marathi and/or Hindi at home and were first generation English language learners. The textual content of the magazine represents their authentic expression and work.

Next post: Republic Day

(All images in the following posts have been taken by the author and have not been modified using any photo editing software.)