Teaching young toddlers the ABC can be a challenging and fun activity! Getting this first lesson right, is important, as this is going to be the first formal learning experience for the child, and sets his mindset and attitude for lessons ahead. So it is important for teachers to be well-skilled to make this an interesting learning experience for the young student, who is at this age – eager to lap up knowledge in this exciting, new world that is opening up to him.
Some smart ways of teaching are those that incorporate the maximum use of sensory skills. So teachers must use visual representation, sound, feel and touch to get the same message across, so that:
The message is iterated in different ways and this gives a holistic learning experience to the child.
Different children find different mediums easy to understand, so using a mix, enables each child to learn better through the medium he is naturally best suited to.
Here are some ways the different sensory skills can be used, and ways at which Treamis too looks at teaching its young students.
Vision
Looking at alphabet posters.
Looking at alphabet books.
Looking for letters in the newspaper or magazines.
Hearing
Listening to the ABC song.
Singing the ABC song.
Listening to and repeating nursery rhymes that mention certain letters.
“Education will be the single biggest transformative factor in catapulting India into the league of developed nations. It is education that will establish us firmly as a knowledge society.”President, Pranab Mukherjee, President of India recently said.
The Government of India has been working consistently in this direction, and in fact in 2009 the landmark “Right to Free & Compulsory Education Act” was passed by the Government. This Act entitles all children between the ages of 6-14 years, free and compulsory elementary education. It is based on principles of equity and non-discrimination.
All states are working towards this objective, and Kerala is one state that is ranked among the most literate and educationally progressive states in the country.
Kerala was also the first state to introduce Information Technology as a subject at High School level. The state is now moving towards IT Enabled Education. The initiative taken by Kerala is now influencing other states and Karnataka and Gujarat are also planning to introduce Free Software in their schools.
In Karnataka, Bangalore has evolved as one of the global education hubs in India, having a number of International schools. These schools come under the purview of Indian education board such as ICSE and CBSE, as well as international boards like IB and IGCSE.
These international schools focus more on the holistic education for their students rather than just focusing on rote-learning, and Treamis is one such school.
Earlier too Bangalore has had a proud lineage, and the first engineering college(UVCE) in Karnataka was started by the then Diwan of Mysore Sir M. Visvesvaraya in 1917 in Bangalore. It was the fifth engineering college to be started in the country at that time.
As Maulana Azad, our first Minister of Education said, and whose birth anniversary we celebrate as “National Education Day” every Nov 11, “Education imparted from the heart can bring a revolution in society.”
