Notes from school. 14 September 2026

How a child learns language here

We keep asking ourselves what it means for a child to learn a language. Is it tracing the alphabet, again and again? Memorising sounds and reciting them on command? Or is it something that grows from wonder, curiosity and lived experience?

For a four-year-old, language is a way of making meaning. Making sense of objects, actions, feelings, situations, and the stories around them. A bird flying becomes a story. A mango eaten by an ant becomes a poem. We wrote that in the introduction to the book of our children's stories, and it is still the best short account we have of what we are doing.

Speech is acquired. Writing is taught.

Nobody teaches a child to talk. They talk because there are people to talk to and things worth saying, and by four they have done most of the work themselves. So the first thing we do about language is make sure there is plenty to say, and somebody listening.

Every day begins in a circle where every child says something. There are songs for the ordinary moments of the day: one while tidying up, one before eating, and a child who knows them starts them on their own. There are stories told and told again, and poems with animals in them that the children act out. A child who learns the walk of a frog, a rabbit and a duck has a great deal to say about frogs, rabbits and ducks.

Whole words before letters

Children meet language here whole and meaningful: words inside poems and stories they already understand, chosen so that the earliest ones have no matras in them. Meaning comes first. The बारहखड़ी, the full table of letter and vowel-sign combinations, comes late, as a way of tidying up what a child already knows, not as the gate they must pass to begin.

Some things are deliberately never made to wait for each other. A child composes long before they can write anything down. Invented spelling sits alongside conventional spelling. And the Hindi of home, the Khadi Boli of western UP, sits alongside standard Hindi, because a child's own language is the material, not a fault to be corrected.

Written down exactly as it was spoken

Last year, six children in our Junior KG group, all four and over, told more than forty original stories in Hindi. Each one was spoken freely, written down exactly as it was told, and printed opposite the drawing its author made for it. Nothing was corrected. We called the book चटर-पटर, and it has a note of its own.

Read a year of those stories in order and you watch something happen. A child starts with one line about something they know. Then several lines, the thoughts still scattered. Then a sequence where one thing causes the next. Then a place they have never been. Then people talking to each other, working something out, minding how somebody else feels.

Nobody tested them to find that out. It is in the book. Through telling stories, a child builds fluency and vocabulary, sentences and their grammar, the shape of a narrative, memory and sequence, cause and effect, imagination, turn-taking, and the confidence to speak without fear. None of it came from memorising sounds.

Writing, when the need has arrived

Writing comes after all this, and it comes more easily, because by then a child has run into the need for it. A child who wants their story on the wall wants to write it. Marks on paper start as scribble, then as signs, then as letters that stand for something the child already means. That is the order, and we do not hurry it.

A child is never behind. A chapter is where a child currently is, and children move through chapters at their own pace. We will tell you which chapter your child is in and what we are doing about it.

Hindi first, and English after

Hindi, as their first language, becomes the soil in which their thoughts take root. English will come later, but expression must come first. The framework agrees: NCF-FS asks that learning in these years be in the child's mother tongue, and the research it rests on finds that a strong first language is what a second one grows from, not what it competes with.

So when you visit, you will hear a great deal of Hindi, some of it Khadi Boli, and a child telling a story about a buffalo. That is the English lesson, too, a few years early.

The introduction to चटर-पटर cites Chomsky and Tomasello on how children acquire language, Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, Bruner on narrative, and Cummins on the first language as the foundation for the second. The observation notes are from one child's Individual Progress Report, Nursery, 2025–26, with the name removed.