Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Inventure wishes Radio Indigo Happy Birthday!

Selected students from Grade 5 and 4 visited Radio Indigo, Bangalore’s upbeat Western music radio Station, for A VERY SPECIAL REASON.  Accompanied by Mr Ravi and Ms Sandra they recorded the HAPPY BIRTHDAY song to be aired on Radio Indigo’s 5th birthday on Monday, 19th September. 






The Indigo Kids as they have been christened are: Pradyun Singh, Varun Ramakrishnan,Ananyaa Bharadwaj, Rivka Aarons,and Armani Vikram. 

Inventure raises funds for Terry Fox and cancer research

Fourth and Fifth graders were  inspired and motivated by the true life story of a  young boy who after having had his right leg amputated from bone cancer, decided to raise money for cancer research by running a marathon a day across the country on one leg! They were able to raise Rs.38,000 and a few students even attended the Terry Fox Run : a 5 km walk, jog, run for Cancer at Kanteerava Stadium  Sunday, 18th September 2011.


How to get your kid to read: Advice from an eleven-year old

By Maya Patra
I learnt to love reading when I was barely three. My mother taught me how to read, not with flash cards or fancy CDs, but by reading Dr Seuss’s Cat in the Hat and Go Dog Go every single day. I loved Cat in the Hat because of the funny drawings, and for some reason I also liked the cat’s springy, stripy top hat! Then I learnt to read and my poor mother had to hear me reading Sue Likes Blue all day long.

Reading is very special to me. When I get grounded, it’s not ‘No TV for two weeks!’ or ‘Absolutely no computer for one month!’ but ‘No reading for the rest of the day!’ And when I don’t read, I get very, very cranky.

Reading can take you to magical, fantasy places like Narnia and Hogwarts. When I’m bored, all I have to do is pick up a book. There are new adventures and new sights to see and explore. I mean, when I’m reading a good book, it’s almost like it’s real!

My favourite books are Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. When I first read them, I couldn’t put them down. For instance, take the first line of Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian: “The end of the world started when a Pegasus landed on the hood of my car.” How could you not keep reading? This series helped me learn about Greek mythology in a fun way. What I like most about his writing is that he is sarcastic, suspenseful and funny.
The fights are more exciting than any computer game, and often the bad guys win. Most computer games are all the same; you shoot or punch people, you win, and they die. But every book is different in some way or the other. Even when I have read my favourite books a hundred times, I keep reading my favourite parts again and again.

Do you want your kids to enjoy reading just as much as I do? Here are some of the reasons why I think kids don’t read:

Television: Of course, you guessed it! Some kids in my class watch TV for three hours or more a day. Making a set time for TV will make a huge difference. My mom only lets me watch TV after 6.30 pm.
Gadgets: I also don’t own any electronics. Sometimes you have to be tough and say NO to the requests for Wiis, iPods and laptops. My friends have all sorts of things but when I asked my mother, she told me to read a book instead. When my friends ask me why I don’t have an iPod, I just tell them that I read instead. They are so surprised that they are struck speechless.
Not cool: Half of the boys I know think reading is ‘uncool’. When one of the students did a book report and won a prize for it, the other boys teased him about being a loser until he finally gave up reading for good, just to be part of the ‘cool club’. Sometimes other girls call me a bookworm, but I just ignore them. Encourage your kids to stand up to people like that. Reading is one of the coolest things ever.
So boring: These days reading is a chore, something that has to be done, like eating vegetables or doing homework. Don’t use flash cards or give long lectures about the importance of reading but make reading amusing and fun. One way to do it is to form a book club for your kid with one of their friends. Reading with a friend is always great fun.
Parents who don’t read: Let your kids see you read. While parents are nagging their children to read more, they are watching hours of TV. So read in front of your kid and maybe they will try to copy you.

Finally, sometimes kids don’t read because they don’t know what to read. Here is a list of my top 10 favourite books that most children my age will enjoy.
• Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
• Molly Moon series by Georgia Byng
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Which Witch? by Eva Ibbotson
• Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas
• Born to Run by Michael Morpurgo
• Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
• The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

So you see, it’s not that hard for anyone to love reading. Sometimes when a book is really exciting, I even read in the bath (which always ends up with the book soggy and the bathroom flooded). So be warned… Once someone starts to read, they can’t be stopped!

Maya Patra is 11, lives in Bangalore and is a student of Grade 6 at Inventure Academy. Apart from reading, she likes to swim and draw.

Fourth grader Darsh Kadam converts to composting

Darsh and Khayyal Kadam attend a composting workshop organized by Daily Dump on 10,11 September at Fabindia.
That's not a burger patty!

Maggoty  Magicians
The final product
We went to Fabindia for a composting workshop organized by Daily Dump.We began by playing a game in which there were many cards on a mat and we had to guess and pair them up, insect to insect. It was kind of fun and interesting.

After that the staff showed us some bottles and inside the bottles were composters such as centipedes, flies, spiders, maggots, earthworms and ants.

Then they told us to look around Fabindia looking for junk with red bindis on it and we found bottles, glass, packets, batteries, fruit peels and paper plates. After finding these they asked us to put it in the dustbin and then segregate the junk into different dustbins which were marked biodegradable and non biodegradable.

 After that they explained the concept of how every living thing basically gets its energy from the sun and then they gave us some booklets to read, of which some were based on water, some on air and some on electromagnetic waves. Thus ended our Daily Dump session for that day.

We learnt a lot that day. What we call junk and rubbish is treasure for the insects, and they help in decomposing biodegradable rubbish to rich compost, that helps plants grow organically without any use of chemical. Our family decided to adopt composting too!

Friday, September 30, 2011

Nooraine’ s winning ways

It is not every edupreneur and CEO that has to her credit a series of wins, that too on various golf courses scattered over the world!  Sharing news of these wins is a matter of pride for the whole Inventure community!
Colorful feathers in Nooraine’s Golf cap are
-         Turnberry Cup, Scotland (team of four, including Anirban, ranked top 5 in India)
-        Callaway Tournament, KGA (individual Trophy)
-        Toyota (team of four). Competed as one of 120 teams!
-        Won one longest drive and 2 closest to the pin awards at two of the above tournaments
-        Member of a team of 12 which has qualified for the south zone finals of the Touche Gang wars. 1600 golfers across India participating
-        Represented the wining team from India in the “Race to Ireland”, at the Irish open pro am with Jeev Millka Singh as her partner.

Inventure Academy is reckoned to be a formidable name in school sports. There is no doubt that students here draw their inspiration from their CEO, Nooraine Fazal.  From her spirit, encouragement and zeal they imbibe her desire for winning and her pursuit to win. Sports can be very serious business and not mere recreation, our teams have discovered.

Inventure Academy’s Alisha dances for a cause

 
Alisha Kalyanpur, a student of grade 9 at  Inventure Academy recently performed at a Bharatanatyam dance performance to raise funds for the People 4 People foundation, a Whitefield-based NGO which puts up playgrounds in government schools in Bangalore, among its other activities.

Titled ‘Dance for a Cause’, the program was held at the Jagriti Theater in Whitefield on 21 August 2011 , Alisha performed the sinuous Krishna padam as a solo, and a resounding foot-tapping Thillana along with her co-dancers. The grand finale was titled Sadbhavana, a fusion dance performed to musical compositions by Mozart, Benjamin Britten, AR Rahman, Bryan Adams and Michael Jackson. The last piece of this, danced to the melody of “Heal the World” brought the entire audience to its feet and tears to many eyes.
The show was a sellout and raised over Rs 5 lakh.