The classroom in the community

Suma Vivekanandan

Every town, whether rural or urban, has buildings and places that exist for the benefit of the community. Libraries, parks, places of worship, hospitals, town halls, sports centres, theatres… all have the potential to make learning exciting for students. Learning outside the classroom is an enjoyable experience for every child and they all make positive contributions to the learning exercise. I’d like to share my experience of working with students outside the classroom.

The idea
I decided to do a project on “My geometrical town” with the students.

Aim
To recapitulate the geometrical concepts that students learnt.
• Parallel lines
• Perpendicular lines
• Intersecting lines
• Geometrical shapes – polygons
• Angles – acute, right, obtuse, straight, reflex, and complete angle
• Area and perimeter

Procedure

• Students were taken outside the classroom.
• They were made to sit in a circle.
• The place we chose to sit was adjacent to a road from where students could see three roads.
• I explained and showed them what parallel roads meant.
• Then they were asked to think of and identify parallel roads in their town. The children managed this task beautifully. If they did not know the names of the roads in their town, they gave their own creative names.
• After identifying parallel roads, perpendicular roads and intersecting roads, they drew and coloured them on paper.
• The next instruction was to draw a few buildings/shopping malls with different geometrical shapes.
• Students thoroughly enjoyed and drew buildings in pentagon shape, malls in triangular shape, swimming pool in hexagon shape.
• The next task was to identify different angles they see in their market.
• Students drew vehicles and marked obtuse and acute angles, they also drew a bakery with pizza, cake etc., and marked the different angles. Two roads joined to make a straight angle. The most interesting of the drawings was a picture of a shop with a clock showing 12:00 noon and the angle marked was a complete angle.
• Students also found out the (approximate) area and perimeter of their society.

It was a wonderful and satisfying experience. The students too enjoyed their day out and told me that they didn’t know learning could be this much fun. These students looked like they had learnt their geometry lessons for life.

The author has been working as a teacher in Atul Vidyalaya, Atul for the last 23 years. She has a passion for teaching mathematics to primary students. She received the “Star innovator award” given by The Progressive Teacher magazine in 2015. She can be reached at suma_1967@atulvidyalaya.ac.in.