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	Khelghar Khelghar dreams of a society where all our children get caring and enabling environment to blossom. Overall personality development of a child is influenced by many factors like the surrounding environment, sense of security and happiness they experience, appropriate and timely answers to their problems, encouragement to learn, and a loving-caring company of adults. Unfortunately, today’s world throws many questions around these factors. It’s difficult for many children to get supportive environment for the kids. The children residing in Laxminagar slum in Kothrud area of Pune city are no exception to this widespread reality. The children here are deprived of a childhood as it should be. Khelghar aspires to alter this situation by making education more enjoyable and meaningful for these children.
	The Phases of Children’s Development

	Children realize the joy of arning The slum children are mostly enrolled in government schools, which many times fail to keep alive interest of children in education. The monotonous, unidirectional and imposing teaching methods diminish child’s interest in learning itself. At Khelghar, we use playing, communicating, handling various art forms, which are proven effective teaching media. We also try to relate learning with personal experiences of the children. We try to maintain considerate and friendly environment, so that every child’s needs are properly perceived and addressed. This makes learning process more enjoyable and meaningful. Once children taste the true flavor of such learning, they willingly take efforts to pursue their education. The basic human abilities, such as listening, seeing, tasting and thinking are used to develop capacities like observing, talking, reading, writing and thinking. Various activities in Khelghar are especially devoted to help children refine these fundamental human faculties in order to develop them into proficient skills.
	Awareness Building With growing abilities, children become aware of their surrounding. Their thinking power develops, many questions are raised in their mind and some times get confused with the answers. Sometimes they can react to the incidences in a strange manner. Khelghar helps them in this delicate journey by analyzing the incidents, talking about its influence on self and others and taking decisions for future actions. They learn to be sensitive to their emotions, control them carefully and apply them at appropriate time for an appropriate cause.
	Collective Efforts Awareness of ones’ situation and ones’ problems should logically lead to efforts to overcome them. Khelghar has initiated a process of bringing parents and elderly children to address local level issues by coming together.
	The values we uphold in Kheghar : We strive to maintain child friendly environment Discipline is accomplished neither by punishments nor awards, but through self regulated behavior Children are encouraged to exercise their choice and not compelled to participate in each and every activity We believe in equality of all human beings, irrespective of their class, caste, gender and age. We prefer co-operation to competition Liberty is realized through responsible behavior We choose to explore creative methods for evolution rather than relying on typical examination oriented evaluation
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