21st October 2021

St. Teresa’s Institute of Education celebrated Vachan Prerna Divas on 21st October, 2021 at 1.50pm via zoom meeting. Vachan prerna divas is originally celebrated on 15th October every year on the birth anniversary of late Dr. A.P.J Abdul kalam who strongly promote reading. The session was in collaboration with Gandhi Shikshan Bhavan’s Surajba College of education.

The session was started by a prayer service by Ms. Upassana Sanghvi and later a brief introduction was given on vachan prerna divas and later different books were displayed Dr. APJ kalam . Later Ms. Shkuntala Nighot introduced the resource person Ms. Jyotsna Sawant. later the resource person started the workshop on speed reading techniques by sharing a google form on reading habits after this MS. Jyotsna sawant gave us imputs on benefits of reading and asked the participants to read book for 3min. later she asked the participants to share their difficulties they faced while reading for 3 minutes. After this ma’am explained us how we can calculate the reading speed. Ma’am Jyotsna asked us to read two books Seven Habits of highly effective people’ and 2 States, then asked us to calculate the speed of our reading through the formula, shared the google link with us and asked us to put it on the Google form.

Ma’am gave the technique of reading through the pointer- finger. Pictures in the books makes our reading very interesting and gives clear idea of the content. The concept of mind map was taught and how the matter can be portrait on the flow chart. Tony Buzan is the founder of mind mapping. Ma’am then asked us to draw the mind map on the drawing paper with the matter on the book ‘Seven Habits of highly effective people' which was projected on the screen. To do this mind mapping we need to note down the subheadings in the chapters in mind map format. Ma’am asked us to note down all the main chapters from book 'Seven Habits of highly effective people’ Mind mapping should be so comprehensive so that with one glance reader should get full summary of the book. Good reading habit helps us to read even the jumbled words. We skip many things while reading for example grammar like articles, adjectives, adverbs etc.

In short speed reading techniques are

• Use pointer – finger
• Read chuck of 4-5 words per fixation
• Try to notice the keywords.
• Avoid fillers like articles, supporting verbs, adverbs and conjunction
• Avoid sub vocalization
• Trust your mind/ instinct/institutions

After teaching the different techniques of reading Ma’am Jyotsna again asked us to read the book once again and calculate the speed and compare it with the previous. It was really helpful in our reading to increase our speed in reading and to make the reading very authentic and realistic. Ma’am also taught the uses of World web dictionary and PDF reader.

The prizes of the book review competition and best library user was announced by Dr. Cerena D’cunha . in book review competition the first was Sr. Cinthiya, second was Rohini Save and the third winner was Arlene Bose. and the first winner for best library user was Upassana Sanghvi and second winner was Ruby Sharma. Later a formal vote of thanks was given by Gayatri Joshi and then the session ended at 5.10pm with National anthem

The program was a great success with valuable information highlighting the need and importance of reading and mind mapping