A group of 15 students from PSBB KK Nagar worked with the students of Udavum Karangal, a social service organisation in June this year and continue in July too.

The programme, “Happy Moments” is spearheaded by Mrs.Devika Raman, a Social Science teacher of their school.

Devika Raman is an alumnus of The Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program (TEA), a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State which provides secondary-school teachers from Europe, Eurasia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Western Hemisphere training and opportunities of exchange programmes to learn innovative methods of teaching.

In addition to this, the program provides grants to alumni to conduct activities for community service. Devika Raman chose to work on the all-round development of the underprivileged children of Chennai and has decided to work with the students of Udavum Karangal.

In April 2010, the student volunteers from PSBB visited the students of Udavum Karangal and distributed books, bags, uniforms among others. A dance programme for the children at Udavum Karangal was performed by the students of Sri Devi Nrithyalaya, run by the well known dance guru Sheela Unnikrishnan.

The sessions which are for children of age group 12 to 15 years include activities like English communication, storytelling, craftwork, creative writing among others. The volunteers also plan to identify each child’s interest and help them to develop it.

In the first session, which was an ice breaker, the children had fun in introducing themselves, sharing their dreams and hopes, drawing, singing and dancing, learning magic tricks and origami.

The student volunteers, who enjoyed the unique experience, now look forward to spending more time with their new found friends during the next session.

Tiny tots of Rosary Matriculation Higher secondary school celebrated Bliss 2010 on 25th Feb 2010 at their school auditorium. This programme was celebrated as an inauguration of their Diamond Jubilee year. The chief guest of the event was the former principal Sister Leena D’souza. The active participants of the program were the kindergarten kids of the school.

The celebrations began with bible reading, kuran reading and gita reading. Principal Sister Siriya Pushpam gave a small introduction about the future plans for their institution. Their main plan for the year is to create and educate people about the environment awareness. Though they have started creating awareness, their aim is to maximize their efforts.

The theme of Bliss 2010 is 'Fairies and fantasies'. Sister Leena mentioned, “Children are fairies with wings of imagination.” The program was more colorful than a rainbow! The tiny tots sang a welcome song followed by colorful dance.
The first state to come on stage was Kerala. Small kid came in the traditional Malayalee dress and gave the sizzling performance.
Next they took the audience to Srilanka performing a Srilankan dance. Then they took us a tour to Hawaii through their dazzling performance. 
A few kids acted out the story 'Snowhite and the seven dwarfs'. It was pleasant watching the kindergarten kids perform. The celebrations came to a conclusion with the vote of thanks followed by the National Anthem and School song.

Sir Sivaswami Kalalaya celebrated National Science Day from 22.2.2010 to 24.2.2010. The week’s celebration started with a short speech about National Science Day, and was followed by a paper presentation on robotics by 2 alumnus of our school. The audience was class 11 students.

The presentation gave very interesting information about autonomous and manual robots, semiconductors, micro controller, nano robots, etc. It is predicted that in the future nano robots can be used to cure cancer cells. They also explained how to build a line following robot and showed a model of it.

Then they showed videos of ASIMO, a humanoid robot created by Honda, playing football. There were also other robots showing a nano robot replacing a neuron, a snake robot, hexapod, line follower robot, edge avoider, etc. The two ex-students said that a line follower robot can also be used as a spy!

A Dumsharads competition was held for class 6 students.

Later in the evening, class 8 and 9 students were shown a science based movie in the school auditorium. The show was obviously enjoyed by all! Class 8 was lucky this year because they were called as the audience for most of the programs.

On Tuesday there was an extremely interesting and lively Guest lecture “An Invitation to Physics” for these students by Dr. M.V.Satyanarayanan, Associate Professor, Department of Physics, IIT, Madras. He wanted the students to understand that Physics is actually interesting, which many people do not generally agree!

He gave a very lively speech combined with a dash of humour. Through the PowerPoint show he made us understand that Maths, Economics, Physic, Chemistry, Biology, and all other subjects are actually interlinked and one cannot survive without the other. The following information was taken from one of the slides. It shows how Physics helps Medicine. 

Did you know that 2005 was celebrated as “The year of Physics” and it coincided with the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein? The Professor kept the students busy in taking down little facts that he told here and there.

Then came the most interesting part of the lecture in which he performed simple experiments in front of the enthusiastic audience.  He kept a tennis ball on top of a football and dropped them both together. The football bounced and hit the tennis ball which almost touched the roof due to the pressure from the football, before coming back! The audience was thrilled and clapped till their hands pained because they hadn’t expected the ball to bounce so high!

Then he swirled a top which looked very normal. It started spinning and suddenly it overturned and continued spinning without any disturbance!

Then he took a dish like thing with a lid with a hole in it. When you look at the hole from a certain angle you can see a small pink little toy pig standing on a mirror. But when you try to hold the pig you are unable to do it! Even the teachers were amazed. Then the Professor revealed that the inner side of the dish was made of mirror in which he had placed a small picture of the pig. This lively lecture ended with a question session.

Then an oratorical competition on the topic “If you were the Environment Minister, explain your policies to improve your city or country” was held for class 7 students.

On Wednesday a Potpourri competition was held for class 8 students. It was mainly based on science and consisted of games such as Dumsharads, Pick out the good word, Pictionary, etc.

All these competitions were conducted two Class 8 students, H.Malini and Meera Viswanathan.

Everybody agreed that this was the best science week celebration ever!

All of you must have visited the Guindy National Park one of the best  National Parks in India. TERI (The Energy and Resource Institute) organised a nature walk inside the park on Feb. 15, 2010 for middle school students. Sir Sivaswami Kalalaya, St. John’s, PSBB, Church Park, Alpha Matriculation, Maharishi Vidyalaya, Valliammal Matriculation, and CSI Jessie Moses were the schools which took their students on this tour.

Pavithra and Muralidharan from TERI briefed the students about this program \'Climate EduXchange Project\'. Each student had to answer a pre-assessment questionnaire which contained questions about national parks, endangered animals, etc. 

Then the students went around the Guindy Park for 45 minutes, observe everything and note it down in an observation sheet that was provided to them. Students were also requested to make drawings of the different textures of tree barks that they saw and collect leaves and seeds. Some students also stuck dry leaves of different shapes on their observation sheets.

It was interesting to go around this park which is the only national park situated inside a city. The students could see many things such as common langur, painted stork, sambar deer, porcupine, otter, etc. We had to note down the name, habitat, type of branching, seeds, fruits, eating habits, and many more information in the observation sheets. 

The students were excitedly running about trying to fill in as much information as possible. But many of us were unable to fill any thing in the ‘fungi and algae’ column. 

Then came a quiz! Each school formed a separate team, so there were 8 teams. The questions were very difficult, but we learnt a lot. Some of the questions were about lithoral forests which are found in the Sunderbans, \'Hanguri\' which is a type of red endangered deer, Kaziranga National Park, etc. Another new piece of information for us was that Firozabad is called ‘The Glass City of India’. At the end of the quiz St. John’s emerged as the winner, followed by Church Park, while there was a tie between four schools for the third position!

The students were then provided with lunch. They had a hearty meal and returned to their school inspired to save nature and spread the message around.

Bamboola kicked off its star gazing club with over 40 enthusiasts joining the meet  on Feb. 12. They discussed nebula,comets, galaxies and more they viewed the Orion Nebula M55 and other objects with the celestron 6" telescope, the club plans to meet every fortnight.

Valentine's day was celebrated at Bamboola where both fathers and mothers joined the celebration and enjoyed family games, activities and made time capsules for their children.

The admissions to play school/pre-kg/day care and after school for June 2010 is now open at Bamboola . For more details call 24611779