Rajani's Book Review

Rajani has just finished reading her first chapter book by an Indian author. She has the following review:

Nine-year old Siddharth has parents that want him to play outside, like nine-year old boys do. He goes out, and he hears a rustling noise. First, he thinks it is a snake. Then, he goes to the fence and peeks over, and he sees a little baby elephant. So, the elephant and Siddharth are friends. First Siddharth tells the baby elephant his name. Then, the baby elephant tells its name : its name is Aishwarya. Siddharth roared of laughter. But the elephant tells him that it is rude! The elephant wants him to call her Alise.

Alise and Siddharth have lots of adventures together. Alise is a real talking elephant. She likes to chew gum, and likes to put a bow on top of her head. She likes to play cricket.

The "Bearded Bandit" is a man who kills elephants for theirs tusks. So, his assistants are looking for the "elephant graveyard." They hope to find lots of ivory tusks. Alise whispers, 'master, quickly, come here!" And soon the Bearded Bandit is face to face with Alise. Alise lifts him with her trunk, by his waist, and she asks Siddharth to cover his mouth before his assistants hear him shout. After that, Siddharth said to Alise, "put him in the deep pit." Then they call the forest rangers, and they become heroes.

Alise and Siddharth go on an airplane to be on television, and Alise gets everything she hopes for. Siddharth's parents are proud of him.

The book is Living Next Door to Alise by Anita Nair, with illustrations by Anitha Balachandran. Penguin Books India, 2007. 99 pages.

School update:

Rajani is home for the end-of-term-holidays. The first term ran from June through September, and culminated in a series of "worksheets" (we don't use the t-e-s-t word!) on all subjects: English, Math, Science, and Hindi. She has done wonderfully well on all, and wants me to specially mention her highest score in class for Science. She continues to write lovely sentences, despite the lack of free writing in school. [I make her write some journal everyday, and you can a sample of her free-form writing above, as it was dictated to me.]

In Math, she is adding in the hundreds, (3-digit additions), and is adding more than two numbers at a time (11+ 27+ 7),and is subtracting, borrowing from the tens. She is also learning multiplication tables. In Hindi, she has all her vowels, and most of her consonants down. Next term, she will begin putting them in words. On Mondays, she gets a spelling test from the reading of the previous week. She spells, reflection, rhinoceroses (I couldn't when I was 6!), remember, and light bulb (thanks to the lesson on Edison!)

My proposal to try out a project in the style done in Mrs. Collinge's classroom, was welcomed by Rajani's teacher, Ms. Sudha Narayan. We brainstormed with the children on animal topics, and we formed 4 groups of 4-5 children each. The animals chosen were: tiger, lion, leopard, and horse. We devised games, I borrowed books from the very sparse collection at the local library, other parents sent in coloring tasks, and word puzzles. The goal was to learn a few facts about the animal, and read a lot of books - fiction, non-fiction, and get resources from the web.

Many parents, anxious for the children's projects to be successful, printed out huge lists of facts, created little folders, bound and labeled them, and um.. basically, completed the projects for the children! Ah well! We do want our children to succeed so! It was hard to explain that the process was more important than the end product. Nonetheless, we were proud, at the end of term, to hang up the children's work for parents to see.

A New neighborhood Pal:

They do have a way of figuring out who the animal lover is, even in a city of about 7 million. We first noticed it huddling under our neighbor's car. It was by nature very affectionate and friendly. It only took a couple of tries before it walked up to us with its tail in the air. And before you know, she had us trained to give her a cup of milk, on demand! Now, she visits us in the late afternoons, and hangs out by our car most of the night. She has figured out that we live upstairs (though uncertain as to the floor), for, yesterday, we found her climbing up the neem tree, trying to spot us! We are hoping to grab her for a quick visit to Blue Cross to have her fixed and checked out. She seems quite young, very curious, and thoroughly enjoys the pets and scratches.
Ramya says: No, we have not named her, and no, I don't know if she is going to come back to the US with us!
Rajani says: We have three names for her:
"kutty meow [little meow] Chatterbox Subramanian"
The cat says: Purrr....