session on program design

Hi,

The session on Tuesday, began with an interesting activity where in we had to introduce ourselves to each other in ' different ways '.

Observation: It was interesting as mentioned earlier 'cause we had to be as innovative as possible in our intro's.Personally I felt that as we were familiar with each other, our introductions lacked spontaneity initially , yet it was an endearing experience.

Learning: Some questions posed by Ratnesh: "How would you want your husband or children to introduce you to anybody?" , " How would you introduce yourself to the kids in a classroom?"

Response to the  various answers discussed wrt the above queries:

Operating from a belief puts a lot of constraints, as opposed to having openness.  Putting tags , labels  or assigning roles to ourselves hampers our uniqueness & we can't be our natural self.Our self acceptance leads to children acceptance.Eg: A teacher calls herself energetic & so is under a lot of pressure to remain so even during the end of the session although situation may not be conducive for her to be upbeat & energetic.She feels compelled to look energetic as she operates from 'the belief '.

Second topic covered during the session: Designing programme activities; We spoke of a lot of topics & deduced that limiting the definition of a topic to one aspect puts constraints on the in depth understanding of the topic.We need to bring different dimensions live to the kids.The 3 E's i.e Explore, Experiment, Experience makes learning of any topic fun.In the long run it stimulates and develops students' higher-order thinking skills.

Activities: Topic was ' Water ',which was explored in an amazing depth; All of us came out with answers that covered various facets.Water which quenches our thirst; watering the plants; rain- water; water found in  water bodies like lakes, ponds, etc; water found in our bodies in the form of saliva, tears, sweat,etc.The list was exhaustive.

The next aspect was Key guiding questions:We learnt that questions shouldn't be restricted to few,in fact it ought to lead us to activities.Open ended questions provoked rich thinking & leads to more learning.Questions can make us analyse,Questions can focus on facts & questions can lead to talks about creation.These in fact incites us to design activities.Eg, given to us was:Key guiding questions about Aeroplane.Questions ranged from;How is an Aeroplane made?How does it look( i.e shape of an A);What is the difference between bird & an Aeroplane?How was it invented?When the engine fails, what happens? & so on...

We later took up one open ended Q & explored it from diff perspectives, integrating the various MI's too.

My learning: We need to churn the child to think of more options & in turn a lot more activities; Avoid asking too many generic( not sure of the word!) questions as the purpose of stimulation is lost.Reflection:We moved on to a strategy or let's say a game.We use visual or Kinesthetic( fr older kids) i.e an intelligent game to reflect on their understanding.

Another activity done:Each of us had to take few geometric shapes cut outs & were given the task of arranging them in such a way that it had to look like pic of a "boy dancing"( oops! can't clearly recall the pic. put up...)Anyways, the idea behind this activity was that we were made into grps of 2 & had to pose open ended questions to each other wrt our shapes- creation.So importance of ' open ended questions ' was emphasised.

 

All in all it was a very informative, interesting session.Sessions prior to this too have been a rich learning experience for all of us.We are looking forward to the remaining few sessions!!

Hoping to have a  great time at genie kids,

Anupama....8ttt