Teacher training, as a follow-up to home delivery of reading material to students of Classes 1 to 4 in the district as part of the Samagra Shiksha Kerala Thiruvananthapuram unit’s ‘Vayanachangatham’ project, will begin on March 3.
‘Vayanachangatham’ is aimed at promoting reading among lower primary children. The exercise assumes particular significance in the wake of the impact of COVID-19 on education. According to Unicef, the education disruption has led to loss of basic literacy and numeracy skills among students, with younger and marginalised children facing the greatest loss.
Samagra Shiksha, Thiruvananthapuram, officials say that owing to the pandemic, children will likely have achieved only partially the learning outcomes that they would have in a normal school year. Moreover, teachers will be able to help recover the learning loss only to a certain extent, owing to various constraints such as pressure to finish content and so on. This is where ‘Vayanachangatham’ comes in for it is designed to be carried forward to the next academic year, they say.
Teachers have an important role to play in getting students to take up reading and enjoy it, move to more in-depth material, become more creative, and ultimately start writing themselves. To successfully guide them through this journey, Samagra Shiksha is providing district-level training to teachers on March 3 and 4. This training will be held for three block resource centres (BRCs) at a time. Twelve persons, including trainers, coordinators, specialist educators, and specialist trainers, from each BRC will be trained by master trainers, and a try-out held with participation of students on how to get students to read books, how to involve them in related activities, and ultimately get them to engage in the creative process of writing itself.
Then, a part of the reading material given to students will be read in class, and an online meet held with their parents later that day to ascertain if the students have read the material in full or asked their parents to read it out to them.
Students will also be asked to pen something on what they read—their opinion, about the characters in the story, or draw something related to it. Their work will then be shared in class with other students in the presence of their parents to allow students to analyse their own work. The students’ works will also be brought out in a book format. Parents too will be made to participate in a similar exercise, and their final works brought out in a book form. Both these will be kept in students’ home library.
The programme to guide students to different kinds and levels of reading will continue the next academic year. A writing camp is planned, following which the works produced by the students will be brought out in a book format.
