Balodyan Hosted Absolutely Awesome Summer Hindi Immersion Kamp (BHAASHIK) - 2012
BHAASHIK 2012 was a week-long summer Hindi immersion camp held from July 9th through July 13th, 2012 at Balodyan's Buffalo Grove location.
BHAASHIK - 2012's aim was to stimulate and enrich learners' imaginations and make learning a new language fun through various hands on activities and use of web 2.0 technology tools. Students were be immersed in three modes of communication, as they learnt to interpret stories in culturally rich contexts (some familiar, some new), interacted with the teacher and other learners while sharing their stories and presented their stories / ideas in the form of a voice-thread, a demonstration, an animoto videogram, designing quizzes, skype conversations with kids from India and classroom chit-chat.
Kids learnt to speak, read and write Hindi in playful ways through stories, songs, sports, skits, hands on activities such as preparing meals, flower-arrangements, making tie-dye shirts and growing sprouts. They were immersed in the language and culture of Hindi through games like carom, kho-kho, gillii-DaNDaa, story-telling (subbu signal and other stories), movies (anguur and small episodes of Meena), dances (phir bhii dil hai hindustaanii), and making a commercial in Hindi.
Hindi was used 90% of the time inside and outside the classroom.
Camp objective was to facilitate learning of Hindi through 5 C's (propounded by ACTFL) - communication (interpersonal, interpretive and presentational), culture (perspectives, practices and products), comparison (of cultures and languages), connections (with other disciplines such as science, health, arts, math and distinctive view-points), and communities (taking learning beyond the classroom and becoming life-long learners).