new delhi global dream shaala an initiative for providing free education to out of school children starting with uttar pradesh launched earlier this week on human rights day the initiative will promote functional literacy and numeracy among masses and was born out of an observation of underprivileged children aged 614 unable to read even a oneparagraph story fluentlyaccording to educationist dr sunita gandhi our primary objective with global dream shaala is to provide a zerocost scaleup model of learning that is both quick and effective and that makes learning gain real every day this keeps the motivation of both volunteers and learners higha pilot of this approach was carried out with 22 women volunteers in karauni village in a rural block of lucknow soon these women turned teachers and within the first few months prepared 180 women to take the nlm basic literacy exam by nios together they made more than 800 women in karauni capable of reading writing numeracy later the program was carried out in other cities targeted to educate underprivileged children adults and their mentors may themselves be illiterate their main roles are motivating learners and facilitating their learning as in the new version the videos do the entire job of teaching the volunteers too become literate in the process this will prove helpful in tapping into opportunities to scale up these projects across uttar pradesh starting with lucknows urban slums there are plans to expand the initiative across india including tier 2 and 3 cities and to take the children from basic literacy to class 3 and 5 levels within the programthe global dream toolkits which are used as curriculum to teach illiterate people help learners start to read much faster than other existing primers and curriculums many learners can begin to read within one to two months with just 15 minutes learning sessions per day this is one of the biggest attractions for a learner and the excitement for them is real when within the first 15minute sessions itself they can begin to read six words and associate ten lettersthe approach to teaching and learning is vastly different the toolkit begins by learners relating pictures that are known to them with their first sounds and then combines two sounds to make real words this takes a learner from the known picture to the pictures first sound also known to the letter symbol the unknown this keeps the learner engaged by making mind connections which is vastly different from rote learning it uses greater thinking time and other researchbased techniques to accelerate learning with merely 5 lessons and within 1015 days most learners are able to recognize all letters of the hindi alphabet in another 1015 days they can read a newspaper many of the children that begin in the program could not recognize letters or read a simple passage even after having attended school for three to five yearsdr sunita gandhi founder global classroom private limited gcpl global education training institute geti told