You find them in chai shops, beauty parlours, classrooms, puja rooms, gyms, doctors’ waiting rooms and even on mobile street-food kiosks. They objectify for us eternal visions of gods and goddesses with benevolent smiles, Taj Mahals, macho movie heroes, lissome leading ladies, chubby baby boys, parrots beak-to-beak, freedom fighters with flawless complexions, Sydney Harbour, Niagara Falls….

These colourful posters are a ubiquitous sight in the cities and towns of India; they form a genre of popular art now known as ‘calendar art’. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that these posters have shaped the visual imagination of generations of Indians living in cities and towns. For example, how many of us can conjure up a mental picture of Bhagat Singh or the goddess Lakshmi without the calendar version of their likenesses influencing our vision?

The power of images
Though they’ve been around in one form or the other for more than a century (Ravi Varma’s oleographs were an early form of this popular genre), these popular prints were never considered worthy of academic attention until the 1990s. Today, with Visual Culture Studies being all the rage in anthropology and art history departments, looking at and writing about calendar art has become entirely respectable. There are entire doctoral theses, books, even websites dedicated to calendar art.

Academics are only now beginning to acknowledge what diverse cultures have known for millennia – the persuasive power of images. It does not matter whether the image is ‘art’ or not, whether or not it conforms to some high standards of aesthetic or symbolic significance. Images are capable of enchanting, persuading, convincing, seducing, brainwashing, misleading entire populations; capable of changing minds, perpetuating stereotypes, encapsulating and communicating entire ideologies and world views – often in unnoticed and subliminal ways.

The author teaches art history at the University of Hyderabad. She can be reached at sarada.natarajan@gmail.com.

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There is a saying that goes: “Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.” Projects do just that. They promote students’ critical-thinking and ensure personalized learning. Through projects, children get an idea of interdisciplinary learning, which is the key to innovative thinking and the very foundation of a knowledge-based society.

An interesting way of getting the class to do a project could be to divide them into teams and assign the project to them. Appoint a project leader, set goals, and create a plan. Let the students see the project work as meaningful to them. It is very exciting to involve children in Project rice because rice is connected with every aspect of our lives. In fact, it is life, so students’ engagement is easy and learning is likely to be long-lasting.

Rice is the staple food for more than half the world. More than 2.5 billion people of the world survive on it. India, China, and most of Asia are rice-based societies. One could say that 90 per cent of the world’s rice is grown in Asia. This white grain has shaped economies and cultures around the world.

Scientifically known as Oryza sativa, rice is the thirstiest among all cereals. About 5000 litres of water is required to grow one kilogram of rice. Rice belongs to the grass family and the rice seed is monocotyledon. The International Rice Gene Bank has some 90,000 varieties of rice stored for future use, but nearly 1.4 lakh varieties of rice are thought to be in existence. The deltas of the Krishna and Godavari rivers are together known as the rice bowl of India. Samba Masuri and Sona Masuri are the common varieties in the South. The sweet scented long grained Basmati rice is grown in Punjab and Haryana.

The author is a freelance writer based in Hyderabad. She can be reached at sujata117@yahoo.co.uk.

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Gardening, however basic, is an enriching experience. Just watching a new shoot emerging, petals of a bud unfurling, the scent of freshly harvested coriander or the beautiful colours of variegated leaves gives us great pleasure, especially in today’s rushed technology-filled life.

The activities in this project serve as an introduction to the possibilities of germinating seeds and nurturing them to grow into plants and trees and reaping their benefits, whether for pleasure or for food. More importantly it serves to introduce children to the wonders of the natural world in a way that is fun and likely to spark an interest that will last a lifetime.

Walk through the garden – an introduction
Begin by talking about gardens. What do children see, feel, hear, and smell in a garden or a park? Take a walk around the school garden or visit a park. It should be a sensory experience, to help see the world in positive ways.

There are seven basic requirements in order for plants to grow properly – temperature, light, water, air, nutrients, time (seasons), and space (room to grow). Discuss these with the children.

Plants can be grown indoors or outdoors for food, shelter, clothing, medicine, energy, and pleasure. Discuss the uses of the trees and plants in and around your area. Did you know that every part of the banana plant is useful! (even the root stock, for planting new plants).

The author is a Hyderabad-based illustrator and identity designer and holds an M.Phil in Plant Sciences. She is also a Nature enthusiast and enjoys working with fourth graders on nature awareness and gardening at Vidyaranya School along with Sadhana Ramchander (who has planned and initiated the module). She can be reached at kobi25dk@gmail.com.

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In a short story, writer Ursula LeGuin has the first woman (to whom much of the world assigns the name “Eve”) deliver the inhabitants of the Garden of Eden from their names. In the story, the woman gives the creatures of the garden the freedom to be anything, relieving them from the “burden” of these labels placed upon them by Man.

If we were to stop and think about this, we might at first feel very confused. After all, what would the world be without names? How would we understand different entities and their relationships? Do names “fix” us in certain ways, as the story suggests? Or are they simply convenient descriptors that help distinguish one from the other?

One of the first things we do with language is to assign labels – a name to every ‘thing’ we come across. We show children objects and tell them what these objects are called. In time, the appearance of the object, its qualities, and its value, all become associated with the name. The name becomes more than a word. It becomes a symbol for a whole set of qualities, values, and appearances. There are stories behind names and names for stories, there are fights over names and who owns them, and whether and how to change them. What did it mean for the city of Bombay to be re-named Mumbai, or for Madras to become Chennai? Is there a difference between calling a state Uttaranchal or Uttarakhand? Why was Hurricane Katrina given its name? And why are the planets named so?

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Watch any young child outdoors, in a garden or a park. If allowed to play freely, you will probably conclude that children are born with a sense of wonder for Nature! Unfortunately, many of these toddlers will enter school with that instinct diminished. Our increasingly urbanized environments coupled with parental obsessions for sanitized playing conditions for their kids, ensure that any affinity children may have had to explore the natural world soon disappears. A school project on the subject of “trees” then is one of the many ways through which children can be helped to connect or re-connect with Nature.

“Trees” as a topic can be viewed through a multitude of lenses: botanical, geographical, historical, ecological, and so on. But the greatest value of doing a project on trees would be to use the opportunity to inculcate a deep love and appreciation for the natural world and for the outdoors. Psychologists increasingly acknowledge that being close to nature helps to promote a beneficial state of mental health. So if you help your students to develop a love for nature, maybe you are giving them a gift that they will treasure through their life!

The author has been a member of Kalpavriksh since 1984 and her main engagement has been in the field of environment education for children. She has authored two story books for children and has also co-authored environment education handbooks and resource kits for educators. She can be reached at sujikahalwa@gmail.com.

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Way back, when I was about eight, a friend told me a “great secret” in very hushed tones: there were little people just like us, who lived under the earth… They came out at night, and hid from the giants (us) during the day… Of these two complementary ideas, the tiny and the mammoth, the former is especially appealing. Whether it is children playing with their toys, or adults creating models of something they wish to build (or are copying from) in the ‘real’ world, miniatures fascinate us. Can we, as teachers, make use of this fascination to get children to learn? The good news is, yes, we can, and across all levels of school. Here are some ideas that can be used in the middle school. Ideally, this would work as a week-long project with different subject teachers participating, and with two consecutive periods devoted to it daily. However, you can vary the ideas and/or scale them up or down to suit your specific classroom needs, or you can choose to only carry out some of these.

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It’s all around us, whether we like it or not, and even when it’s not, we notice its absence, or create it in our heads. Sound is an essential backdrop to our lives. A project on sound offers so many possibilities for all subjects and so can become too vast for a teacher to control. Instead, why not concentrate on one familiar kind of sound – music – that holds within its study all the properties, concepts and illustrations that we need to learn? This project does just that. All music is sound, but only some sound is music, and that very fact leads us to all kinds of discussions about sound, music, noise, silence and speech.

Even a teacher with limited resources can handle this project satisfactorily. You don’t need an expensive science laboratory or fancy gadgets. Even if you do not have access to a CD player, never mind, your students can create enough music to fuel the project! Our outline concentrates on the scientific aspects of music and sound but there’s plenty of scope for language activities, and history and geography too. Think about it.

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Many years ago, I was a participant in an EVS (Environmental Studies) workshop at Mumbai conducted by Mr. Evans of the British Council. He asked all of us to close our eyes and raise one finger when we felt that one minute had passed. Wisely he didn’t tell us how many of us were far off the mark but this shows us that a sense of time and duration is difficult to understand and acquire. However the importance of ‘time’ cannot be denied as the smooth running of our lives, and our transactions with others depends on an accepted measure of time. Time, therefore, is harder to do than topics like air, water, homes or clothes. It is because of this that some points have been put down for teachers to think about before planning the topic.

This project first appeared in the September-October, 1992 issue of Teacher Plus and was written by Janaki Iyer.

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Teacher Plus has been as a mantra talking about the project method to deliver content in the classroom as a means of tapping into the innate resources of the child and also to make the classroom a stimulating place.

Some of the reasons that some practitioners give for not being able to implement the project method is the heavy syllabus and the classroom numbers. Recognising and appreciating these concerns, we started with the August issue this year, sample “webs”, a series of stories which have guidelines on how to link further to different subjects. The first story “Happy and the We landers” talked about how to live in harmony in the midst of diversity, along with which, were given pointers on how to link it to various subjects. Taking this further and realising the need for teachers to have an “instant pill”, we bring you this month yet, another story “Dr. Happy goes camping” (see poster) in a delightful narrative that reiterates the need to believe in ourselves and realise our uniqueness. We have then gone on to give some detailed exercises on linking it with the various subjects. The topics and levels are approximately at the class 3-4 level.

The authors are partners in Edcraft, Hyderabad, a firm engaged in making teaching-learning materials, conducting workshops and providing consultancy services. They can be reached at edcraft94@gmail.com.

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Birdwatching can be a pleasurable hobby and is one of the most popular outdoor activities in several countries. It is gaining popularity in our country as well. Almost every major city has a birdwatchers’ group which studies and photographs birds.

Birdwatching need not be a part of a biology class, it can start as a fun activity outside school hours. Slowly, one can draw the children into a more serious study through projects and activities that could make birdwatching a meaningful pastime. Unlike in some of the western countries, we have very little data on the natural history and biology of our birds. It is up to amateurs and individuals to fill in the void from their own observations. I hope this article will help teachers start their children on some projects that are simple to execute but at the same time informative and educative.

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