Uncommon ways to teach common prepositions

Urvashi Nangia

Recently, I had the opportunity to teach a group of 9-10 government school going children. Catering to their demand of learning English, I planned 30 activity-based sessions for students studying in classes 5-7. The sessions were one hour long and held in a park.

One of the sessions was on prepositions. The NCF 2005 states that “the language class offers some unique opportunities. Stories, poems, songs and drama link children to their cultural heritage, and also give them an opportunity to understand their own experiences and to develop sensitivity to others. We may also point out that children may effortlessly abstract more grammar from such activities than through explicit and often boring grammar lessons.” (Pg. 38)

So instead of teaching grammar explicitly, I decided to take a more organic, implicit route. I started off the session with a question. I asked the students to tell me the meaning of ‘come in’. Many students said that this phrase was routinely used in their classrooms and it meant aajao. I then asked them what ‘in’ meant. They repeated that ‘in’ meant aajao. It was interesting to know that while their decoding was correct, the children didn’t know the individual meanings of the two words.

Continuing in the same vein of introducing the children to commonly used prepositions, I moved on to reading a bilingual storybook titled Follow the Ants written by Amrutha Satish and published by Tulika. In this book, Anita, the protagonist closely follows a line of ants across a room, over a table, under a chair, through the kolam and so on. Each page has one line written both in English and Hindi. This is accompanied by simple, easily relatable illustrations by Soumya Menon. As it was a small group of children, each child read one page. All children could, without exception, read both languages. However, it quickly became apparent that they understood the meaning of the leading English sentences only after devouring the ones written in Hindi (their mother tongue) and keenly following the illustrations. We then made a list of the different prepositions that had been used in the story along with their meanings.

To firmly add these prepositions to the children’s everyday vocabulary, I used three other activities over the month. First was via the medium of drawing. The students had to draw a picture illustrating at least one preposition they remembered. They could do it in any way they liked. Most students drew exactly the same pictures as in the storybook. Encouragingly, two students drew pictures from their own experiences using objects/animals like a ball and a cat. The second activity involved physicalization. The students had to navigate the park by following a list of instructions. E.g., they had to walk on the path, along the wall, sit on the swings, cut across the park, run around five trees, stand under a tree and so on. We did many variations of this. The children loved this activity and had a lot of fun meandering in the park. Over the next few days, they kept asking me if we could do this again! The third activity involved enacting simple sentences. Excitingly, one round into the game, a student created a sign, which helped others to guess many prepositions. She first enacted a house and then depicted words like ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘across’, in relation to that. Thereon, all students used the same sign.

These sessions confirmed my belief that stories, art, games, etc., are not only powerful ways of learning in themselves but also prove to be very effective mediums to teach language.

Source: National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) (2005). National Curriculum Framework, 2005. New Delhi: NCERT.

The author is currently working as an Independent Consultant in the Development Sector. She holds a Masters in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and an M.Phil in Education from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She can be reached at urvashinangia@gmail.com.