I chose this book and thought that it would work well in std. 7 in Smt. Sunanda Bai High School. It is very difficult to get the students point of views, but all set and done, I entered the class.
I began with a discussion before the game, wherein they had to give me some animals names which they find around us. Dogs, cats, snake, frog, ants, rats are the animals from the story; which I got by supplying some clues; though I also got some other animal names like lion, tiger, elephant, etc.
Each bench was given an animal name, and all they had to do is say “HELP!” when the name of their animal was called out. They liked the game, though they were shy to play. Some boys were laughing and the girls were giggling when I was calling out the animal names, making fun of me, “what is wrong with this teacher playing kids games?” But believe me, it was a fun game!
It was nice to hear from them that they had helped others; mostly who had fallen on the road and had also been helped by others.
OK! I remember that I have still not mentioned the book I read aloud to the students.
Well it’s Help! Help! by Sandhya Rao and Proiti Roy.
It was very interesting for the students as well as for me to see how animals are thought to be helping each other, where actually if you consider it, they are not. I say this is because when I asked the students, “besides the theme help in this story what else you could find in the story?” They told me that, “there is a connection between the animals like the snake eats the frog, etc.” Then why were the animals running after another? The students told me that they were scared of the animals or the things. For e.g. dog ran with the fear of a stick, cat with dog, rat with cat, man with rat, snake with snake catcher and frog with snake.
Is there a connection between the snake catcher and rat? Or the stick and the dog? Well I did not have an idea on this, but my students told me that the dogs get scared of sticks, and the man gets scared of rat because they are in our houses so each ran after the another.
Did the frog really helped the ant? “NA!!!!!”
“Taka tein kavpak jai ashille”………?
Who helped whom? Well, for certain, they helped me get a new perspective on this book.