The all new

Volunteer Curriculum


We provide a free curriculum for volunteers to empower them to teach English to those who really need it

Our curriculum will make you and your students very happy!

Download our first lesson and
see for yourself how easy and enjoyable English teaching can be!
Email me the first lesson!

There is nothing as deeply satisfying as the activities one does to give back to the society.

You are here on this website means that you truly believe that teaching English to a person from an underprivileged background can help them improve their life!

Our website is created to support English teachers and volunteers like you to become highly effective in teaching English to your students!

 

We provide an easy-to-use, ground tested English curriculum for free for volunteers!
And we are very passionate about it!

We provide an English curriculum (with over 20 lessons) that helps volunteers teach English very efficiently to students of all ages. 
The curriculum focuses on teaching only those English skills which would directly help the student use English in their day to day conversations. And the curriculum starts from ground up and even students with the most elemental knowledge i.e. students who know only the alphabet can systematically start learning English skills from the curriculum 
The curriculum has been designed by volunteers for volunteers. We keep it up-to-date based on the feedback that we receive from the volunteers who are using it to teach their students
Even if you have zero prior teaching / volunteering experience you can use this curriculum and become a satisfied and effective teacher loved by your students
Our Curriculum is free. And we want every volunteer to take advantage of it while teaching English.
But we do understand that every volunteer faces a unique situation and the curriculum may not be ideal for some volunteers. 
Here is how you can quickly find if the curriculum is suitable for you to help you develop essential English communication skills in your student

Step 1

To get started immediately, click on the green button above (Email me the lesson plan) and you will
receive our first lesson immediately 

 

Step 2

We make all our lessons very easy to read and understand for the teachers. Hence, one reading of the lesson will make it clear to you if your student(s) will benefit from this lesson or not. If the answer is yes, then you should teach your students a class or two using  this lesson 
Step 3 
By the time you complete teaching the first lesson, you will be able to clearly see if your students like the lesson plan and if the lesson plan has made any visible improvement to your students’ English. If the answer is yes then you should continue teaching your students English using our curriculum!

Step 4 

Please drop a note to me –
Raghav Nyati ([email protected]) 
I am the founder of Volunteer Curriculum. Just mention that you have completed teaching the first lesson and would like to receive the next lesson to continue teaching English. I would ask your feedback about the lesson and then email you the next lesson! 
After teaching each lesson, you just need to drop me an email and I will send you the next lesson!
This ensures that our curriculum goes to only those volunteers who see value in it!
Here are answers to questions that we get frequently asked by volunteers...
We understand that it’s not easy to teach English to someone who may have to go to bed with an empty stomach. Learning English would be much lower in their priorities. But learning English can prove to be an essential skill for them to improve their earnings. So we have designed the curriculum to ensure that the students are only taught English that matters and in a very easy to understand manner. 
Our curriculum is designed for volunteers by experienced volunteers. And every aspect of the curriculum is tested with volunteers to ensure that we include content that works with students at the bottom of the pyramid! 

Our Guiding Philosophy

Meaningful communication in any language is achieved through sentences, and not by standalone words or phrases. So from our very first lesson plan, we only provide teaching content that will directly ensure that the student learns how to form meaningful sentences in English. 

This is how we execute: 

Our lessons do not focus on teaching grammatical concepts, dictation exercises, word spelling and pronunciation etc. like most English curricula do. Instead, our curriculum very thoughtfully weaves all these concepts together in the background to ensure that the students, who are barely getting their stomachs filled, are made to learn only that which enables them to form simple meaningful sentences in English – sentences that would help them have conversations in English in various common situations.
In this manner, the students are not required to fuss over whether something is a verb or an adjective or used in a passive sense etc. And all of their attention and energies is utilized for learning new English sentences. 
To most effectively and efficiently teach sentence formation, we have made sentence formation as mathematical as possible. In each lesson plan, the sentences (to be covered) are broken down into their constituent words and arranged neatly in a tabular format. This makes sentences formation highly visual and intuitive like playing the ‘match-the-following’ puzzle. This also removes the excessive rote learning that students (in their initial learning phase) have to undergo to remember even one new sentence. 

Innovative visual representation that makes learning English super easy and fun is at the heart of this curriculum

Also, each lesson plan is constructed to fulfill a specific learning objective for the students. The first lesson plan will help your students learn how to introduce themselves using English sentences. Second lesson plan – how to introduce objects and people around them. Third lesson plan – how to describe the attributes (shape, size, color etc.) of objects around them. And this sequence goes right up to our last lesson plan. 
Lastly, the examples, exercises and activities in the curriculum have been designed with students from the weaker economic background. So, you would not find examples of fast cars, golf, special cuisine foods – things which might make these students feel alienated. And all the English conversation scenarios are created by keeping in mind the situations these students face on a regular basis – like going to the market to buy groceries, playing football in a playground etc.
 
No prior teaching experience is required to use this curriculum.
You may have never taught a word of English to anyone before and still you would find it very easy to start teaching English using the curriculum.
This is because we provide detailed teaching instructions in each lesson plan. These instructions are easy to understand and provide ample space for you, the teacher, to customize things based on your taste. 
Also, we fully understand that teaching English (as a volunteer) for the first time can be frustrating because, unlike Math, in English progress is not immediately visible in the students. 
Hence, we have created mechanisms in the curriculum to ensure that your students are able to create and speak out new English sentences even after you complete teaching each new lesson plan. 

You will be able to see improvement in your student’s English after every class! 

This ensures that you, the teacher, clearly see what all new English sentences and communication skills your students have learned from your class today, instead of waiting for months to access this by a formal test. 

The curriculum is designed in such a way that you can use it with students of any age and English skill levels.

Lets say your student knows nothing else but the 26 letters in the English Alphabet. Still, you can very effectively use this curriculum to help them develop English communication skills. 
And if your student has exposure to English, then you can still use the curriculum to: 
a) test their English communication skills by using the carefully designed exercises and activities in our lesson plans, and
b) fill the gaps in their skills by teaching them appropriate lesson from the curriculum
The lesson plans provide ample instructions to help you decide what to teach to your students and what to skip.
The curriculum can be used in any teaching setup. You could be teaching English on weekends through your local education NGO or helping your maid’s children with their English subjects. In all situations wherein the student needs to improve his / her English communication skills, our curriculum would prove useful. 

Many volunteers from popular education-based NGOs including Teach For India, Pratham, Youth for Seva and others have successfully used this curriculum with their students. 

And there were also many others who have used the curriculum to teach English to a much smaller audience like their maids, security guards, mess workers etc. The volunteers have also been of all age groups – from college students in their late teens to working professionals in their 40s.  
For your students, the lesson plans would contain everything they need to know to develop their English communication skills from ground up. They would need to use any other reference books / material to support them. 
The curriculum will also provide you complete teaching instructions, teaching content and exercises and activities in each lesson plan. So you would not need to use any other content for reference. 

The teaching instructions are made quite simple and easy to follow and you would not need to use google or ask any other teacher / volunteer for help.

The curriculum aims to teach English communication skills so that the students can have conversations in English. 
Let’s say that you already follow a different English curriculum (NCERT, state board, an NGO created curriculum etc.) to teach your students. 

But you could still use this curriculum very beneficially along with your existing curriculum – to fill the learning gaps present in your your students English.

Improving the English communication skills will significantly enhance your students’ ability to learn the English medium subjects like science, social science, and even English itself. 

 

Read the story behind Volunteer Curriculum…

I thank you for visiting our website and wish you all the best in your volunteering and teaching journey!

 

Raghav Nyati, Founder of Volunteer Curriculum

[Feel free to drop me a note on [email protected] to discuss anything related to volunteering or teaching English]