Subject teachers at the school level have a major responsibility in terms of inculcating learning attitudes and generating interest in a particular subject. We all know that our own interest in a field comes in large part from how we experienced the subject in school. The inspired and passionate teacher of language probably led many a student to go on to study language at the university level; the inventive physics teacher most likely kindled a passion for the science in more than a few students; the clarity and precision conveyed by the math teacher perhaps motivated many a student to go further in search of numerical truths. Even in cases where we may not be motivated enough to take the interest through to a university degree in that subject, the interest at least carries us through the examinations and makes study of that subject pleasurable – and not the chore it could otherwise become.

The inspiring teacher is one who cares. About the student, primarily, but also about the subject she or he deals with. It’s when you care deeply about a subject that you can share the excitement and energy while talking about it. When we care deeply about a subject, we are also motivated to share that with others, and we care that the others (in this case students) also come to share that excitement with us. It’s through this shared excitement that an environment of learning is created. Then you really don’t need to “teach”. The learning just happens, and the student experiences the true pleasures of discovery.

Awards such as the TCL award for chemistry teaching, or government awards for long service do their bit to encourage and motivate teachers. But the true motivation comes from engaging with the subject.

When I was asked to write an article for this magazine, I began wondering what I would write. Despite the many, many years of teaching behind me, I had a tough time deciding on a topic! Information is now available at one’s fingertips. Google on anything under the sun and hey, presto, you’ve got it! But oh, the thrill of creating a lesson plan from start to finish by yourself and seeing your children’s responses of enjoyment and learning, that is something one can only experience.

After a lot of deliberation and reflection, I finally chose to just share my experiences of teaching Environmental Studies in the primary classes with the readers. It happens to be one of my favourite subjects because of its huge potential to make the class creative, fun, and exciting for the child. One needs to have a clear, overall objective in relation to the subject and of course, one has to keep the age group of the child in mind at all times – not go overboard by cramming irrelevant activities.

The clear objectives that I have while planning lessons are:

• to make the lesson cross-curricular (to laterally refer the topic across all subjects) – to incorporate exercises which emphasize on observation and inferences (For eg. Instead of telling an urban grade 2 child, “The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west”, you can ask them to observe the movement of the sun over a period of days at different times of the day. They will discover the pattern themselves after which the names, east and west can be introduced).
• to keep the students engaged at all times.
• as the teacher, to facilitate only by asking questions that will get the children to think.
• to counter the child’s question by another question, extracting the answers from them, either individually or in groups. (Eg. in the 4^th grade instead of telling the students that, “water evaporates from the oceans, lake and rivers”, ask the children to observe what happens to water left in a saucer, what happens to wet clothes and what happens when a plant is covered with a plastic bag? Let them conduct the experiments and find out about evaporation and condensation. Once they find out that vapour needs a surface to cool on, ask them another question – “On what surface does water condense in the air?” (I’m sure many a teacher wouldn’t have asked this question to herself! Actually I was asked this question by a child and I had to find the answer before getting back to the class the next day).
• it is very important for the student to feel the ownership of learning through his/her own observations.
• and to top that, the teacher herself needs to understand the topic thoroughly if she is to answer questions by the children.

The author worked at the Rishi Valley School for 14 years. She is now the Quality Head of the Primary School at the four Parikrma Centres for Learning, Bangalore. She can be reached at ambikap@parikrmafoundation.org.

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Many parents don’t realize the importance of active participation in their children’s education. Some see their main role as “providers” – their primary responsibility being to ensure that their children have a roof over their heads, to put food on the table and to see their kids are enrolled in a good school. However, some parents seem baffled when, after taking care to provide for the essentials, their children return from school with report cards that indicate poor academic performance, and worse, poor behaviour.

Often, the immediate reaction is to blame the teacher or school for being negligent, as parents don’t want to feel that their laborious efforts are inadequate. After all, if they are paying tuition (either directly through fees or indirectly through taxes), shouldn’t it be the school’s responsibility to ensure that their children learn properly? However, when parents confront teachers with the problem, the teachers typically shrug off the blame, pointing out that other children in the class are doing fine.

The downward spiral
Here’s where the problem arises: when the parents and teachers deflect the blame, fingers then point to the student as the culprit. Accusations fly, “She must be lazy,” or “Maybe she has a learning disability.” In a desperate attempt to remedy the problem, parents try externally motivating steps such as instituting punishments or offering their children bribes for good marks and behaviour. The downward spiral begins.

It is true that students have a significant role to play in their own learning process. After all, they are the ones who have to “do” it. However, there is a growing body of evidence that indicates that external motivators don’t work, and that children’s success in learning and behaviour is strongly linked to the involvement of their parents. And by involvement, I do not mean an emotionally charged concern twice or thrice a year at the time of test results and report cards. What I mean is a small amount of consistent participation throughout the year.

What parents can do
Parents’ involvement in their children’s education can include:

• Helping them establish a daily routine.
• Ensuring accountability (checking to see that kids have completed their homework).
• Helping them set study schedules and learning goals.
• Showing them learning techniques.
• Providing timely feedback.
• Helping kids see links between what they are learning in school and the world around them.
• Taking interest in what their kids are learning and talking about it with them.

There are also some parents who realize they must play a greater role in their children’s lives, however, due to certain circumstances (e.g., single parents or parents who work late), they are unable to do so. My response is that these activities do not necessarily take a lot of time. In fact, they could take as little as 15-20 minutes per day, although they do require commitment and regular, conscious attention.

A personal experience
Let me share an example with you: A father recently came to me regarding his son who was performing poorly in school and whose teachers reported he was constantly disrupting the other students in his class. Full of anger, he unleashed a flurry of attacks on the school and his son’s teachers claiming they weren’t teaching properly. I heard him out fully. Then, I asked about his role in his son’s education – was anyone checking on him regularly at home to monitor him or to participate in his learning process? His tone changed almost instantly, as he apologetically admitted that his wife didn’t take any interest in her son’s studies, and that he himself came home too late from work to check. I then convinced him to get home a little earlier every day, and to spend just 15 minutes with his son each night to check his homework diary and at least take a cursory look at the homework. The result: In just two months, his son’s academic performance improved by as much as 30% in some subjects, and his behaviour problems virtually came to an end.

(Note: I can clearly see how this small change in parental involvement caused an immediate effect, however, the father will need to keep up this effort continuously if he wants to see the results maintained.)

The upward spiral
When children see that their parents or other family members take active interest in their education, they feel motivated – they internalize the values they will need in order to become mature, successful individuals. In the short term, their academic skills and behaviour improve. They also learn that their parents, no matter how busy, are prepared to make sacrifices – financial or otherwise – for their child’s benefit. As a result, when they become parents, they’ll likely support their children in the same manner.

The author is an American educator, TV personality, public speaker and bestselling author based in India. He can be reached at steve@jiva.com.

As teachers, we are often told: “Think, reflect, keep an open mind; you will not grow otherwise…’ Very recently, I went through an experience, which made me understand what this really meant; I realized that as teachers all of us have also to be learners and without a ‘last date’ attached to it. To explain what I mean, I need to share with you an experience that left me not liking myself very much, one that is etched deep in my ‘racial’ memory. I was in Sri Lanka a couple of months ago, the day I turned 55 in fact, to participate in a programme on teaching life skills and make a presentation on aural/oral language assessment at the school level. Representatives from Cambridge Assessment had also been invited to do something similar.

I finished my presentation and after lunch, the Cambridge representatives were to make theirs. I was particularly interested in listening to them to find out what the stance of professional ‘big time’ evaluation experts on summative oral testing would be; at the same time, as an evaluation person, I was quite aware that the ‘what’ of the presentation was not likely to spring any major surprises. Knowing that post prandial presentations tend to have a soporific effect on the listener (yes, I only meant “we tend to feel sleepy in after-lunch sessions”) and aware that I could not use the ‘hand on head, eyes half-closed’ ruse, I was looking for ways to stay awake when I realized that I could use this as an opportunity to listen to this language evaluation discussion in Tamil. A Sri Lankan government ruling dictates that simultaneous interpretation of all major English deliberations must be made available in both Sinhala and Tamil.

My mother tongue is Tamil and I have studied it as a second language up to the college level, but my language of academics in general and ELT in particular is English. Discussing evaluation in Tamil would have been impossible, but I hoped I could make sense of it if I heard it.

I therefore marched off to the interpreters’ table to find out how it was being done, and whether I could listen in Tamil. There were five grey haired people sitting at that table, four men and one woman. The men were in suits, tied and booted, while the woman was in, what seemed to me, an untidily worn sari. The men and the women were not fair, and had a light brown complexion but the woman had darker skin, a bit scarred. I automatically assumed that the men were the interpreters and that the ‘lady with unkempt clothes and hair’ must be there to handle some clerical work.

The talk began and I got myself a pair of ear phones and started listening. And whose voice did I hear first? The lady’s, and she was doing a remarkable job: simultaneous interpretation is not easy. One has to listen to what is being said, and then, while the talk is going on, keep providing the equivalents, as fluent discourse, in the other language. This is done in 15-minute intervals; that is, one person speaks for 15 minutes and then the next person takes over. One just needs to look at the person who has just finished to realize how difficult and onerous this task is: they just rest their heads on their hands on the table in front of them, or lean back on their chairs and close their eyes for at least 5 minutes. After the session was over, I spoke to them about their choice of words and we had a good discussion on a variety of topics like the problems of interpretation versus translation. I don’t even remember their names now, but the three of us, the two Tamil interpreters, the lady and the man, and I, had a very interesting discussion, in fluent academic English on these problems, and then continued with a discussion in Tamil, where I was the one who was at a big disadvantage. I did not have the content words for many concepts in evaluation, and had to search for them, supplied more often than not by the lady interpreter.

I felt terrible at that point, but masked it and got on with the discussion, but later, in the privacy of my room, sat down to think and did not like what I ‘saw’.

This was not a simple ‘appearances are deceptive’ issue. It was much more than that. Deeper? Ingrained? Biased?

An old lady in her mid fifties with grey hair, neatly parted down the middle, hair tied in a knot and in a slightly (in retrospect) crumpled saree (later I discovered that she had travelled nearly 50 kms by bus to get to the programme in time) according to my prejudiced mind could only be a clerk! And this conclusion I had come to without even thinking about it. I did not like what I saw of myself and so sat down to think and reflect. Have I done this earlier? Have I been rude or harsh to a student with a dark complexion? To a student who spoke with a strong regional accent? Let a pretty girl or handsome lad get away with a lot more than I would have otherwise….?

I could not recollect actual instances, but in the fringes of my consciousness were traces of such prejudices…all I could do was squirm mentally and make promises to be unbiased as far as possible… to not ask, how dark? Sepia or chocolate….

The author is Professor, Department of Testing and Evaluation, EFL University, Hyderabad. She can be reached at gdurairajan@gmail.com.

I begin this article with a short poem, When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman, which I would like you to read aloud to yourself.

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

This poem exemplifies the difference between the mathematical/scientific approach to a subject and the literary/poetic angle. Whitman, being a poet, is naturally biased toward the non-technical approach. He is allergic to proofs, figures, charts and diagrams “ranged in columns” – all things arrayed in perfect, military precision that would gladden the heart and the “little grey cells” of the detective Hercule Poirot himself.

Wearied and sickened by the scholarly astronomer’s clinical perspective on the subject, he “glided” away, his movements mirroring his mood, and glanced up to refresh himself with the sight of the stars. “In perfect silence” implies the meditative mood, a complete absence of analytical thought and comment. His mind is at peace and bathed in soothing silence after the lecture full of instructions on how to dissect ‘add, divide and measure’ the wonders of the night sky. Immersed in the “mystical moist night air” – far from the overdose of dry facts injected by the lecture, he continues to study the subject by direct observation. He looks in “perfect silence” at the stars. The line suggests that he drinks in the cold, pale beauty of the stars against the soft darkness of the night sky, in silence, without feeling the need to comment, qualify, analyze or otherwise dissect them. A reflective poem, it underlines the need to look at things as they are in all their “quiddity” instead of analyzing them to death.

In the light of the fact, as this poem suggests, that arts and sciences look at the world differently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the latent poetry in a group of engineering students from Thodupuzha, Kerala, who were attending a class on communication. The group task they were set was to describe abstract concepts in a concrete way, using the five senses. So apt and evocative were the images the students used to “describe” abstract nouns such as “anger”, “loneliness” and “hope”, that I must highlight a few of them here:

The changes brought about by “revolution” was described as “the awakening of tides”; sorrow pictured as “a leafless tree,” “melancholy music heard from a distance” evoked the sounds of loneliness, hope was like “first rain” for a farmer, and smelt like “chicken curry in Somalia”. Anger was blood-red, sounding like a “war trumpet’, and peace was white, like snowfall in summer. Considering the general tendency to think in clichés, the similes these students brainstormed were surprisingly original.

So what can we conclude? Can man live by numbers alone? Is language just a tool for business-like communication? Why do we ignore the fact that words have such tremendous power to unlock concepts, arouse memory and plumb emotional depth. In a day and age when the ”successful” student is focused solely on language as a superficial means of clearing the “verbal ability” cutoffs in an entrance exam or impressing the moderator in a group discussion, it is time for teachers to remember that the word is packed with power. Far from being mere functional instruments that we use routinely like a toothbrush in the morning, words are the “skin of our thought”, as writer Arundhati Roy once put it in a press conference. Therefore, they contain all the depth of thought, the weight of memory and the motivational magic that advertisers strive to harness and control in order to make money.

Words, and the images and memories of reality they call up refresh the mind and spirit. Like water in a desert, they are desperately needed by students who are starved of food for the mind and spirit. They inspire, motivate and awaken the inner learning creature that can only be sustained, that can only grow and develop on a steady diet of meaning and symbol. And paradoxically enough, as the poem suggests, words also point to what lies beyond them, the world of wordlessness, where the human being learns to exist in silence, apprehend in silence, feeling the reverberating power of perfect silence.

The author is a journalist and teacher, having worked at The Indian Express, Hyderabad and at The Sunday Leader, Colombo. She was also the head of the English department at The British School in Colombo. She now works as an examiner and a teacher trainer in Kochi, Kerala. She can be reached at talitha_mathew@yahoo.com.

Getting children to learn and incorporating value education in the classroom is a challenge for all educational institutions and educators. Finding innovative ways of engaging children is critical to getting them to learn effectively. Our experience of working with children in rural schools has shown us that such methods are especially important in settings facing resource constraints and which have children at different learning levels.

Since 2007 we have been trying out various tools to keep children engaged and to bring value education in the rural schools where we are working. Earlier this year we developed a tool called ‘Vilayadi Membadu’ or ‘Play and Improve’ – an experiential and fun learning aid for children in elementary school. This tool is based on the traditional ‘Parama padam’ or snakes and ladder game. Among other things, it is meant to help teachers talk about positive and negative attitudes, practices and actions in a fun manner so that important messages with values get firmly imprinted in the children’s minds.

The ‘Play and Improve’ tool can be used by teachers, para-teachers or other facilitators in the school. The tool is an 8ft by 8ft flexi board, which can be spread on the classroom floor with squares numbered from 1 to 100. The aim of the game is to walk these squares and the player who reaches the 100^th square finishes first and wins the game.

The author is the Founder-Director of Kalanjiyam. He can be reached at kalanjiyam@gmail.com.

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In the last column (Teacher Plus, January 2012), I had written about a balance that could be constructed using drinking straws, pins, cups and other common objects. The design and template figures are taken from ‘Small-Scale Chemistry’ Laboratory Manual. The design looks elegant and easy to make. What follows now is an account of how the construction of the balance worked for me, with all the difficulties inherent in moving from a US context to an Indian one.

The base was made using a 6mm drill bit. The holes were too small and needed to be converted to 8mm. The next difficulty was to find a punch that punched holes of the right size. All the punches available made holes that were too small for the straw. Trying to get one straw to fit into another snugly took some thought, make a cross cut (+) and the inserted straw wobbles. You can snip a diamond shape (<>) with scissors, but again the fit is not snug. It is difficult to cut a circular shape. Will a heated nail be the answer? Finally, I found a punch of the right size. The next problem (challenge) was the insertion of the straws through the punched holes. The figures show the straws neatly nestled into each other but I found that they squashed and wouldn’t go through. Putting a pencil in the straw before pushing it in helped. Once these difficulties were sorted out, the balance was easy to assemble (photo). A wire tie was used to hang the cup from the notch.

The parts of the balance
The fulcrum is the part on which the beam pivots. The fulcrum here is the pin that is suspended from the posts. The fulcrum has to be friction free so as to allow the beam to move freely.

The pointer shows that the beam is horizontal and also indicates the zero point.

The zero point is the point that shows that the beam is horizontal, i.e., balanced. If the balance is reliable, it should not move from one weighing to another.

The author works with Centre for Learning, Bangalore. She can be reached at yasmin.cfl@gmail.com.

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Schools are central to a student’s larger social world. They are places not just to learn about life, but also to experience it while learning. The making of a student demands great care, sensitivity, attention and empathy. Teachers are supposed to be good at socialization, but they seem to be inattentive, insensitive and ignorant of the issues that children with disabilities (CWDs) face. Through the child’s journey in school, there is a thorough erosion of principles, which affects the tender hearts of the children and subsequently, their lives. In this article, I describe my own experience in school and how it affected me.

At the outset, let me confess that I don’t know whether other students with the same physical impairment as mine have had similar experiences. I am partially blind and attending school was an unending psychological trauma for me. I studied in a school that didn’t have any orientation towards CWDs. It was a place where I learnt to socialize, but I also had a difficult time trying to get my ‘friends ‘to accept the ‘mistake’ in my face.

School was the place that taught me different sets of life skills along with academics. The very first learning was the importance of the ‘cultural status’ of sight, where looks are the barometer. Until I stepped into my sixth class in a government school, I was not aware about the ‘cultural status’ of sight. Being an individual with a removed eye ball – with just a hollow in place of my right eye, and barely covered by spectacles – I was a curiosity among many strangers in the class. I had been walking around unaware of something that was pretty much apparent to everyone else. While I knew about my disability, to discover that others had noticed it too was traumatic. It was the impairment that caused this divide, between the disabled and the non-disabled. I had to give reasons for my ‘no eye’ status to those who tried to communicate with me and when I tried to newly negotiate with the world. Since I was an object of Nature’s mistake, I felt like I was subordinate to the dominating master’s (non-disabled) gaze. I tried everything possible to avoid the curious stares that I received from strangers. These curious looks were not only, not welcome, but they ‘defined’ me as someone ‘special’. An exchange of looks is the highest form of intimacy as also the most potent mechanism of intimidation or power.

This experience led me to understand the importance of physical attributes in building social relations.

The life of CWDs in an un-oriented school environment is very hostile. It is painful to be called by your name with certain prefixes and suffixes attached by your own class teacher each time and that too right in front of 86 other classmates. This was the practice adopted by the so-called well-qualified and trained teachers at the school I studied.

Can’t you realize, you senseless ‘normal’, that the combination of language and body do form the self? How can you listen to the sound of or be aware of a tear drop trickling down my shaky tender cheek amidst the roar of giggles of 86 people? And through all this, the teachers did nothing to check the ridicule.

Sometimes, I used to be angry with my parents for not giving those ‘additions’ to my name. At least, I would have been accustomed to this pain of ‘labelling’. I still don’t know in whose name we need to suffer and for what? Most children with disability do not exactly want help in terms of attending/fulfilling their personal chores. Rather, they need an unconditional social acceptance. The ‘unmindful’ practices of teachers tend to further marginalize vulnerable children.

I am well aware that I am ugly in the unabashed stares of the other children in the class and also the averted eyes of adult teachers. I regard my own form as dangerous, grotesque, unworthy of love. All my cries are muted and in “isolation” and are meant to plead strongly with the world, not to treat me as ‘another’. These experiences made me obsessive about ugliness, convinced that ‘only another’s (non-disabled) love could prove my worth. Is being “lovable” synonymous with being “beautiful”?

I began to imagine my original eye by holding a small mirror close to my face every possible time. You know, a great longing to appear ‘normal’ was there somewhere in the bottom of my heart, because the disability shows and says ‘your abnormality reduces you to something less than fully human’. Therefore, I decided to avoid any reflection of my own image, – in mirrors, steel glasses and plates, spectacle glasses of doctors who visit me often, windows, water, table tops and so on. Did I begin to separate my sense of self from my consuming preoccupation with physical beauty and to name ‘the person in the mirror’ as myself?

I wonder, is such self-punishment common even to boys whose bodies are deemed normal by cultural standards?

I knew that a body that the world accepts is trapped in my body. The person I thought I was, or I wanted to be. I blamed my eye for everything because it is the only tangible element of what has gone wrong with my life and with me. I possessed a strong sense of self. But my experiences in school only succeeded in dismantling that sense. School was the place where I never felt like a human. The house became the one place I felt like myself. And the hospital was the only place where I didn’t feel self conscious about being myself.

The author is a research scholar, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. He can be reached at nookarajub@gmail.com.

Let us recall a small story of the chimp closed in an experiment room with a banana hanging from the ceiling out of his reach. A researcher intending to test the monkey’s mental skills enters the room and places a few large boxes here and there thinking that the chimp would use them to reach the banana. The chimp calmly observes the researcher and as he passes just under the banana, springs up and jumps on to the shoulders of the researcher to grab the coveted fruit.

What is the moral of this story? Real problems never have anticipated solutions and the ‘context’ of a problem is as important as the problem itself.

How to solve it? This question is the holy grail of many disciplines – from mathematics and engineering, through to the sciences and business. We are constantly faced with this question during our lifetimes, both in the work environment and at home. All these represent “problems” which require some solutions … hence the question: How to solve it?

Over the years, two primary approaches to problem solving have emerged. One is the technical approach (represented in many textbooks), which concentrates on specific problem – solving techniques. The other is the psychological approach, which is based on structural thinking – meaning that some structure is imposed on the thinking process during the problem-solving activity. This article mainly concentrates on the psychological approach of problem solving for students.

Students working in a problem-based learning environment should be skilled in problem solving or critical thinking or “thinking on your feet” (as opposed to rote recall). Indeed, puzzle-based learning allows us to learn problem-solving skills. We learn by experience (as we can learn problem-solving skills only by solving problems).

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@teacherplus.org.

I teach English for the primary classes. Although my students can read (and enjoy being read to!), they are totally indifferent to my efforts in getting them to write. Students chew on their pencils endlessly and say, “Ma’am, I haven’t finished,” when asked for their work. I have motivated and encouraged them; I have even threatened to cut down on their breaks, but to no avail! Other subject teachers are of the opinion that their students are unable to write the answers correctly and within the stipulated time because I have not measured up as a teacher! Could you suggest some simple techniques to get at least half my class to write?

Never allow your students to get the impression that writing is a chore or an insurmountable task. Encourage Class 1 students to write on the board. You may comment on their handwriting in their notebooks, but never remark on the handwriting when it is written on the board. It is indeed difficult for a child to write with a chalk on the vast expanse of space with at least 30 pairs of hawk-like eyes watching critically, and to gleefully pronounce: ‘The handwriting is so tiny!’ or “Hey, that’s not how ant is spelled!” or “We can’t read your handwriting!” Make it amply clear to the other children that they will not pass any kind of judgment and that they are there to help one another out.

Allow children to choose their chalk or marker colour. Studies have shown that the use of colors helps children retain information. So, if a child is writing a sentence such as:

I like blue, allow the child to write the word blue using a blue chalk. Not only is it aesthetically appealing to children, but the teacher will also understand that the child has grasped the meaning of the word. It may take longer, but it makes learning, especially writing, more enjoyable. The observers will also pay attention to the colours used on the board.

Similarly, children don’t enjoy writing in their notebook because there is no visual appeal. All they see are black marks spread on white paper. Allow children to write on coloured paper. On occasion, let them use crayons, sketch pens or colour pens to write. This makes the task more stimulating for them and hence they will also submit good quality work. Colours spark the creative talents of children.

Encourage children to copy a short story, a song or a poem that they love. If a child resorts to the use of various colours while copying the story, encourage him to do so. At this stage it is important that the interest of the child remains undiminished. Ask them to draw a picture that will go with the story. Put these up on the classroom walls. Make sure that every child’s writing is exhibited. Give the children a positive feedback. Invite parents to inspect the writing during a break in the company of their child.

The following week, take down the stories and have each child read out their story. If a child has difficulty in reading, help and support him. If legibility is the problem, point out to the child how important it is to write in such a way that it can be read without any difficulty. Such practical feedback helps children appreciate what the teacher is trying to say, rather than the usual feedback like, “Can’t you write neatly? Who do you think can read this?”

Choose a story that the class likes best. Ask each child to narrate a part of the story. Help them with their grammar and use of words, but make sure that you are not constantly correcting them. This could undermine their confidence. Next, ask for volunteers who will draw some of the objects from the story on the board, again using different colours. Ask another group of students to label these objects. Finally, have each child narrate a sentence.

In spite of all this hand-holding, many children continue to stare dolefully and blankly at the sheet of paper placed in front of them because the task seems to be so foreboding. Many a smart teacher has adopted a clever strategy for this. She marks a line with a dot, indicating that, that is where the student concludes. Weaker writers can write fewer lines. The ones who have mastered the art of writing can continue to write longer essays. The child heaves a sigh of relief because he can see where he has to stop! As children start to enjoy writing, the teacher can move the dots further below, informing the child at the same time that he is now capable of writing more lines.

While correcting the writing, don’t focus on all aspects of the writing at the same time. If you do this, then the child sees only red or blue lines all over his paper. Focus on one aspect for every piece of writing. For example, one day focus on grammar, then spelling, punctuation, etc. This makes it possible for the child and the parent to understand the nature of the mistakes and corrections. Too many lines across the page can scare the child; it also makes wading through the corrections very dreary. Moreover, children also feel unappreciated and hence stop attempting to write!

Suggest that the children make birthday cards for one another and write something inside. It could even be a favourite song that they all share. Getting the children to write a to do list can also be fun. Remember, even adults fear writing, so why not help your students overcome their fear by making the process of writing creative and entertaining?

The author is a teacher educator and language trainer based in Chennai. She can be reached at manaswinisridhar@gmail.com.