Trainer Ms. Meena Suresh and Ms. Purva Bhatter travelled to our project sites for projects Sangamam, Thulasi and Pearl to train the teachers in Maths and Science in the first half of Oct 2022.
Science & Maths Training – Oct 2022
By Rajaraman Krishnan, volunteer Asha Chennai
Asha Chennai organises regular training sessions for its teachers in all subjects. The main training for the year is help during the summer holidays – RightStart. RightStart 2022 was successfully held after a 3 year gap due to Corona in early June 2022. As a follow up we decided to have training sessions in Maths and Science in early October during the Term I holidays. When we held these term trainings in the past, they were held in Chennai and the teachers from all locations came to Chennai to attend the same. With the increasing number of teachers, we felt it made more sense to hold the training at the project sites. The details of these training sessions are provided here.
Click here to see photos from these training sessions.
Session Schedule, Participants and Organisation
The training sessions were held at the following locations,
| Kosavanpalayam | Held at PUPS Kosavanpalayam near Thiruvallur. Sangamam teachers (about 60), plus Manigal (4) and Poorna Vidhya (4) attended the sessions. Science training was held on Oct 3rd. Maths training was held on Oct 8th. |
| Kayathar | Held at PUMS Kayathar South. Pearl teachers and even librarians (about 20) attended the sessions. Maths training was held on Oct 9th and science training on Oct 15th. |
| Seeyapoondi | Held at our Thulasi project office and computer centre at Seeyapoondi. Thulasi teachers and librarians (about 20) attended the sessions. Science training was held on Oct 8th and Maths training on Oct 15th. |
The sessions went of well at all the locations. Local arrangements made by the coordinators at all the places were very good. In Thiruvallur alone Meena-mam was assisted by Mrs. Kalavathi during her sessions. Rest of the sessions were handled individually by Ms. Meena Suresh and Ms. Purva Bhatter. Volunteers accompanied the trainers to the locations during every training. Rajaram accompanied Purva to Kosavanpalayam and Meena mam to all the locations. Venkat accompanied Purva to Kayathar and Paripooranam accompanies her to Seeyapoondi.
Maths Sessions
Ms. Meena Suresh has been continuously handling the training of our teachers since RightStart 2014 onwards. She emphasized the usual points like moving from concrete to abstract, on how to use the manipulatives correctly, how to introduce of concepts like place-value and zero, etc. The focus was on what they will be teaching during Term II. The teachers as always learnt a lot through their interactions with her. I also played a small part in the training as the 5th std textbook now talks about two topics that interest me a lot fractals and importance of programming.
Science Sessions
Ms Purva Bhatter has been working with us since early 2020 to guide our science lesson plans and training. She extended upon the training that she did in RightStart 2022. She focussed on the measurement of length and allied things like area, volume etc. She focussed on things like how to use multiple measurements to improve accuracy, units of measurement, least-count or accuracy of devices etc. She also taught the teachers how to use a Vernier Caliper and a Screw Gauge. At the end of the session, Purva had the teachers do various experiments, collect the data and present it to the rest of the teachers. The key thing here was that they were actually measuring things and coming to some conclusion based on that.
Like the previous time, this was once again eye opening for the teachers. They are absolutely not used to learning or teaching science in this manner.
At the Pearl Project, Purva had an extra day. She spent that by visiting 3 middle schools and interacting directly with the children. She did some experiments for the children and explained the results to them. These were,
- The time taken for a candle to extinguish when covered by different size jars/bottles.
- Parts of the plant – Root types, leaf types etc.
- Length of shadow. How the position of light affects the length and size of shadow.
Children at all the three schools enjoyed these sessions and participated with full energy. The feedback from all the HMs and teachers at these schools were also very positive.