Popular films have not just entertainment to offer us but education as well. In the March issue of Teacher Plus we told you how you could use the movie ‘Home Alone’ to teach physics. This article tells you how you can instil life skills in your students by getting them to watch Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
The holidays are upon us again and most of us are looking forward to the long break. While some of us would like to sit back and relax, some others would like to learn new things. However it is we decide to spend our vacation we should realize that in everything we do, see, and observe there is something there that we can learn from and take back to the classroom.
There is no better way of teaching little children than by playing games. Teacher Plus presents you a few games you can play using everyday things like seed, leaves, and tyres to teach children basic concepts of shapes and colours and vocabulary, even while they have fun.
Learning to speak and perhaps even write a language like English becomes easy if we are familiar with the phonetics of the language. This article share a few phonic games, which you can use as is in the classroom or as a springboard to develop games of your own.
Although cooperative learning is the catch phrase in education today, a lot of schools still believe in getting each child to learn on his own. There is a lot of advantage to allowing children to learn together in groups. Here are some tips on how you can incorporate coopertaive learning in your classroom.
Celebrated educationist, Arvind Gupta’s website is a treasure trove for all those who want to learn science. From simple to complex principles, Gupta explains them with ease and all through photographs and videos, which teach you how to make toys from waste materials.
Watch. Practice. Learn almost anything for free.This is the tagline of the website–www.khanacademy.org. The website has over2100 10-20 minute videos explaining concepts in biology, chemistry, algebra, arithmatic, accountancty, calculus and many other subjects in easily understandable methods. Students, teachers, and educators can all come and share and learn on this tremendous platform.
With computers finding their way in all aspects of our lives, teaching computers in isolation is not a good idea. Just like in real life, in school the teaching/learning of computers should be integrated with other subjects. This article narrates the experience of how children in a school learned English, math, drwaing,etc., while they learnt to use the computer.
Srinivasan K Studying the trends and patterns in geography from a book certainly helps, but what appears as understanding, most often ends up as knowledge and information if it is not reinforced by complementary real world experiences. Identifying the interactions between individuals, societies, and the physical environment demands teaching/facilitation through integrated learning. Setting the context of experiencing the real world opens a new window to an advanced understanding and thinking process. Perceived through this lens, we tried to integrate both physical and human interactions in a certain geographical location. The idea was to ensure that students acquire the finer elements of both scientific and socio-economic methodologies while processing information. The location we chose was the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which perhaps are considered the last refuge and cradle of a micro-evolution in the obscure lush green rainforests of India. They also house rare aboriginal populations, dating back to a lifestyle that is at least 8000 years old, which don’t practice either agriculture or cooking. These islands in the Bay of Bengal are a lost world with a wide variety of races, forests, and natural features. The location offered a unique opportunity to understand aspects of anthropology, environmental studies, socio-economic status, and also natural hazards. Students were grouped vertically across different ages between middle and high school. All these four areas of learning were carefully packaged under the bigger understanding of humanities in a confined geographical location. This integration of different subjects has been documented exclusively through ‘Creative Documentation’ workshops conducted by an amateur enthusiast. These workshops provided a platform to research photographing and video graphing styles (especially documentaries), writing scripts, and collating them to produce a final product. Students were encouraged to write a script that involved researching the anthropology and recent history of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, its physical geography, the socio-economic status of the people there, and the hazards and disasters that the region is prone to. Besides this, students were also asked to outline concepts and collect snapshots and videos to cover their areas of research. A brief glimpse of the research documentation is presented below. Anthropology and recent history Our understanding of the six aborigine tribal communities (four in Andamans – The Jarawas, Onges, Great Andamanese and the Sentinelese) (two in Nicobar – Shompens and Nicobarese) formed the basis for understanding the people of the ancient times. A theoretical study coupled with a visit to the anthropological museum offered an excellent learning about these populations and their living habits. We
“Why is the sky blue?” “How does a washing machine dry clothes?” “Why are there dimples on golf balls?” “How do seasons occur?” Our quest to “know more” has led to new discoveries over the ages, which in turn have resulted in amazing inventions. A sense of curiosity and a general inquisitiveness to understand how and why things work has been the key catalyst in the progress that mankind has made. Imbibing this curiosity in the young minds of students adds to the relevance and value of classroom learning in schools. Conventional teaching has generally included magic and mystery, factoids, and the memorizing of random information. More recent advancements in educational research have opened up teaching in the context of everyday objects. The focus of teaching has shifted backwards – objects precede concepts and concepts precede formulas. Teaching how things work is useful in everyday life. It explains things rather than obscuring them. It grows naturally from the ordinary everyday world. It emphasizes thought with understanding and builds a confidence to face the world. The article has been contributed by Butterfly Fields, a company working in the domain of innovative teaching learning techniques. To know more about the work the company does visit www.butterflyfields.com or call 040 2771 1020. This is an article for subscribers only. You may request the complete article by writing to us at editorial@gamart.in.
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