Padippum Inikkum - EurekaChild: An AID INDIA Education Initiative

Children not being able to read, even after going to school for 3-5 years, is the biggest problem in primary education. A child who cannot even read a simple paragraph in Tamil, cannot follow what is done in school. The child's entire school experience is wasted.

To address this problem we developed a reading program called Padippum Inikkum (which in Tamil means Reading is Fun). Padippum Inikkum is an accelerated reading program that gets children to start reading fluently within 5-6 months.

Padippum Inikkum Highlights

	Reach Padippum Inikkum reaches out to almost 10,00,000 children in 15,000 schools and villages in 10 districts of Tamilnadu – ensuring all children learn to read.
	Reading Excitement The program provides children with colorful exciting reading materials – story posters, cards and word puzzles – that motivates children and makes children want to read.
	Reading Activity Class Children are divided into 5 groups based on their reading levels (story, sentence, word, letter and nothing). Each group does a lot of level specific group activities that are a lot of fun and that quickly help children move up to the next level.
	Evaluation of Children's Reading Levels We have a simple reading test which evaluates the child’s reading skill and categorizes it into one of the following five levels.
	Visible Results An evaluation of Padippum Inikkum in 7300 schools in 5 districts was done in April 2007. The program had reached 4,50,000 children in the 3rd-5th Std in these 5 districts. 92% of the children had improved their reading skills within 5 months.

Though we have demonstrated significant results, this is not enough! Reading is too important a skill to be left to chance.

EurekaChild is committed to expanding the reading campaign across the state. We will raise resources, mobilize people and keep working on the reading problem till we ensure that every child in Tamilnadu is able to read fluently.