Doing to discover
Pradita Nambiar
Learning during my school days was textbook and classroom centric. Reading books (other than textbooks) or playing was not considered even remotely useful. I always wondered why the activities that brought so much joy to me were not ‘learning’ and why going to school always filled me with fear, dread, grimness, and everything serious. There was very little room for fluidity, uncertainty, discovery, and fun.
Years later when I began home-schooling my children, I found that my inability to teach within four walls and also to fall into the typical mould of an authoritative teacher opened new doors in the domain of learning. I was unable to draw boundaries of subjects or space and hence learning found its room in all the spaces that we lived in. We had no experts to show us the way, we had to find our own. Anybody could take on the role of the teacher, all of us were learners. Everything, including engaging in household chores or reading stories aloud was learning.
When I subsequently morphed into a formal teacher at a school in Hyderabad, I decided to try this method of learning by exploring and treating everything around us as learning material with a larger group of children. I had a set of 25 boys and girls in the age group of 8-9 years. I was to teach them science apart from many other subjects. I had made up my mind that my job was to instill a scientific temper of mind rather than stuff these little brains with information. I was looking for help and guidance and that’s when I found my inspiration in a handbook. This book ‘Joy of Learning’ Handbook of Environmental Education Activities (Vol I, II and III) developed by the Centre for Environment Education and Vikram Sarabhai Community Science Centre had more than 200 simple activities which teachers and parents could do with children. This became the springboard for the various activities that I devised of my own.
I started using the sun, moon, and stars as my teaching-learning aids. One such activity was moon watching or developing the lunar calendar. Children would plot the shape of the moon each night on a calendar they made. As the calendar progressed during the nights, we would meet during the day and discuss all that we saw (not just the moon) in the night sky. Children wrote poems on the moon, night, stars, and much more. We discussed science, geography, and the history of calendars. Children felt motivated to read more on this. I gently guided them also to look at the moon rising and setting time from the newspaper. After one complete cycle of waxing and waning, there was lots that had been exchanged by this group of curious little boys and girls. They wanted more of this. So, we moved on to the sun.
We decided to observe our shadow all through the day at various times and jot it down with a simple pictorial representation. They took readings in the morning, afternoon, evening, and late evening with the length, direction of the shadow. We extended it to observe shadows of other objects like trees, lamp posts, etc.
I have listed some of the activities that the class did during the course of the year
- Learnt the seasons of trees. A simple activity, all you have to do is locate a common tree in the school or home (e.g., imli, neem) and observe it through the year.
- Observed the shapes of various leaves. The students collected leaves fallen on the ground and drew their outlines. I gave them peepal, mango, neem, and guava leaves to draw and keep them pressed in their books for observation later.
- Children sprouted onions, potatoes to observe the process of sprouting in these plants.
- Children grew their own mould on bread and observed the changes in colour and the various stages of the fungi.
- Observed the stomata of aloe vera through a microscope and drew what they saw in the notebook.
- Listed the various parts of a plant and wrote about the parts we eat (raw or cooked).
- Children observed all animal life in school – ants, insects, butterflies, birds, garden lizards, and wrote a few lines about their observation like the shape of the body, number of limbs, colour, etc.
- Children listed their diet on a particular day and classified the food types and arrived at whether they had a balanced diet.
- Children identified foods in their kitchen which had preservatives.
- Maintained a gardening diary to record all that they did in the gardening class.
- A mushroom hunt was organized in the school to locate and tell the place in which mushrooms grew and why they grew there.
- Children did role plays on the digestive system.
- Listed the animal life living with us in our homes like lizards, ants, cockroaches.
- Observed a caterpillar turn into a butterfly and maintained a record of the life cycle of a butterfly during the various stages.
- Looked for traffic signs around them and drew them in their notebooks and understood what they stood for.
- Understood the terms ‘sink’ and ‘fl oat’ through experiments using various items like dry and fresh twigs, sponge, cork, thermocol, stone, piece of wood, etc.
- Understood through experiments how water filters through various types of soil like sand, clay, and gardening mud.
- Understood how it is easier to swim in salty water than in fresh water by observing an egg in salty water and then in fresh water.
- Used the process of filtration to check if the water is pure enough for drinking.
- Learnt to do a crossword using science vocabulary.
- Children talked about their eating habits and discussed why some are good and some harmful.
- Observed a turtle brought to class.
- Watched the moon over a period of 30 days and drew the shape of the moon thereby learning the waxing and waning of the moon.
- Understood the heat generated by the sun, by focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass to burn something.
- Children walked around the school ground and observed trees in the school. They identified the trees by names, understood the shapes of the leaves and bark patterns by shading them on paper.
- Debated on whether plastic was an environment hazard.
- Created a volcano in class to see how lava erupts.
In all the above activities documenting what is observed was as important as the observation. Amongst the many discoveries that we made there were so many answers and perspectives for everything. We realized the more we found out, how much less we knew.
As my classes became replete with activities, there was something subliminally happening. Children were slowly appreciating and acknowledging one another’s shortcomings. They were facing and dealing with challenges of understanding at their own pace. There was a sense of calm and quiet that had descended on the class. We were becoming more willing to accept ourselves as we are.
Interested in the book?
The Joy of Learning Handbook of Environmental Education Activities is available for free download as pdf. Visit the following link to download the book:
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/joytwo.pdf
The author is managing a preschool in Coimbatore. She can be reached at pradita_n@yahoo.com.
