SAIIER 2014:Isai Ambalam School

Ilaignarkal Education Centre		Life Education Centre
Isai Ambalam School

Aim and mission

Entity::Isai Ambalam School aims to create a learning environment in which the students and the teachers reach their highest mental and spiritual consciousness possible for one’s level, so as to live, learn, teach and function from there.

It aims for effective and successful application of the educational principles of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother through appropriate educational methods for educating rural students and dissemination of the knowledge of the process of this successful application to the teaching community inside and outside Auroville.

Reports from each class

Preschool children (3-4 years old): 34 children (22 boys and 12 girls)

Learning programmes for these children contained activities for the 8 kinds of development at the preschool level. Among them, for cognitive development, the Glenn Doman method or Word Flash Cards method was used. For the other developments weekly or fortnightly thematic projects were used.

Learning programme could be completed to 80% for 10 children, 50% for 15 children, and 30% for the rest of the children. For this, 15 projects designed around 40 themes were used. Regarding their cognitive development under Word Flash Cards method, 11 children learnt to read 400 and 550 words in English and Tamil respectively, 8 children learnt to read 350 and 450 words, and 150 and 250 words by 6 children. A lot of Montessori activities were given for all the children.

Primary Level (5-10 years): 65 students (28 boys and 37 girls)

Separate learning programmes were planned for each of these students. Samacheer textbooks (Tamil Nadu State government textbooks prepared under their Uniform Education For All Scheme) along with Activities-Based Learning (ABL) Cards were used for implementing the programmes for the academic subjects. ABL Cards enabled them to acquire self-learning capacity. Apart from this, the Phonics Method for reading, computer educational CDs, and educational websites were used to implement these programmes.

Subject contents of the learning programmes were 65% completed for the 1st standard, 80% completed for 2nd standard, 60 to 75% for 3rd standard, 60% for the 4th standard. Skills content of the learning programmes was completed by 70% in the 1st and 2nd standards, 40 to 60% in the 3rd standard, and 50 to 65% in the 4th standards.

Middle Level (6th & 7th standards, 11-13 years old): 11 students (4 boys & 7 girls)

Learning programmes of the students in this group were completed by 70% in Tamil, 65 to 75% in English, 90% in Math, 70 to 80% in Science and Social Science. Skills part of the learning programme was completed by 85% with respect to problem-solving, leadership, communication, organisation and creative thinking skills.

Towards integrated mathematics education

Sanjeev Ranganathan introduced a new dimension in Math learning by the 5th, 6th and 7th standard students, taking a step toward an integrated approach to mathematics.

The NCF 2005 document places the purpose of mathematics education primarily as Mathematization, i.e. on developing the ability of children to think and reason mathematically, to be able to handle abstraction. It includes a way of doing things, and the ability and attitude to formulate and solve problems. This idea ties in with the idea of a more integral mathematics which is not a disjoint set of skills to be acquired, but to cultivate a patient problem solving approach to life.

At school the students made measurements as part of experiments, e.g. the period of a pendulum, and thought about how these measurements can be made more accurately. They also looked at relating it to the mass of the bob, amplitude of oscillation and length of the pendulum. They realized that not all quantities in life vary linearly and the need to learn more became stronger. With these as context they re-learnt the basics well including fractions and decimals. They used TLM like Dienes blocks, pizza party to do the same.

They continued doing some science experiments throughout the year (speed, momentum, sound, volume, density, electronics) providing context for mathematics and to see how the progress in mathematics helps us understand and learn about life accurately.

The masterstroke this year was a multi-grade classroom in the second and third term. As the 7th graders approached algebra we realized that understanding of even basic concepts of multiplication and its corresponding (two) division stories was weak. The same is true for addition and its two subtraction stories possible, but we focused on multiplication as these relate to many physical phenomenon (speed-distance-time, speed-momentum-mass, density-mass-volume, current-voltage-resistance, etc). In a multi-grade classroom for children in lower grades started to tell stories of multiplication and division with baskets of mangoes and many baskets, while elder children told similar stories of multiplication and division with the speed of a car, time and distance. In a little time 5th graders got a hang of speed and distance (which they decided to demonstrate with a play for the school Annual day). The 7th graders in turn got a hang of abstractions needed for algebra. We moved to puzzles that needed to be abstracted into algebraic equations and they were not only able to create the equations, but also solve them. They were also able to pick up the connection between algebra and geometry and developed their intuition further with the use of Geogebra.

The girls in 7th grade also built a wind-chime that required them to saw and use a drilling machine. The exercise helped in getting the idea of approximations (holes need to be drilled at 22% of pipes with varying lengths), but also gave them a lot of confidence through the use of power tools.

When the children made their final examination papers to demonstrate what they had learnt – word problems and algebra figured prominently in their tests. These two areas are good indicators of the progress of children in abstraction.

Application for International School Award

In this year we applied to The British Council at Chennai for achieving International School Award (ISA) for Isai Ambalam School. For this Award the school has to identify a minimum of 7 projects and its students have to acquire a sense of international sentiment and traits through doing these projects. We chose the following 7 projects: dresses, festivals, flowers, monuments, currency, plastic and energy. We finished completing the first four projects. Dial Park Primary School of London is one of our Partnership Schools with whom we share our projects. Sandra, a teacher from this school in London, remarked to us in person during her recent visit here that her students learnt through Skype about two of our projects, Dresses and Festivals, a lot about Indian customs and culture. They appreciated the contents of the projects. We will complete the remaining three projects before the end of June 2014.

Micro projects

In the last term of 4 months of this academic year, 20+ micro projects were created with the intention of achieving specific learning and teaching objectives with a focused, intensive and conscious effort. These micro projects each lasted from 3 to 10 working days, and one session of one and a half hour per day was spent for each of them. Out of these, 12 projects were completed achieving the intended learning objectives. The following are those micro projects:

Types of Magnets by Sanjeev and Gomathi. 5th – 7th standard students. 5 days. Learning about the properties of magnets and their uses in industry. Teaching objective is for the teachers to learn to provide the students with needed hands-on activities. These objectives were achieved.
Learning art through things of nature. 4th standard students. 8 days (once a week for 8 weeks.) Learning objective was to learn to design creatively using things of nature made available at Auroville Botanical Gardens. Objective achieved very satisfactorily.
Storytelling and writing workshop. 3rd-5th standards students. 3 days (6 sessions). Learning Objectives: to create one’s own story and narrate it coherently; to create a hand-written story book in beautiful handwriting with hand-drawn pictures. Teaching objective is to learn to stimulate in the students a great desire to read many story books. Objective achived satisfactorily in 15 out of 37 students.
Drama writing and acting workshop. 4th-7th standard. 20 students. Learning objectives: to write, on their own, appropriate dialogues fitting with the character’s role, speaking and acting it out well; to create finger puppets of the characters and act; to learn time management for the drama performance and for carrying out the workshop activities. Objectives achieved well.
Four bilingual stories: “Sweet Choco”, “The Farm”, “The Magic Chisel” and “Knowledge”, written both in English and Tamil and recorded and played. 2nd-7th standards, 50 students. Learning Objectives: to understand the meaning of English sentence texts; to learn the English sentence pattern by becoming familiar with the first and second words (subject and verb) in English sentences; to communicate in English appropriately. Learning objectives achieved considerably well.
GESE (General Examination for Spoken English) for students. (The GESE is practiced and conducted in the pattern of Trinity College, Cambridge.) 1st to 5th standard students. Learning Objective: to learn to communicate in simple English for 7 daily life contexts. Objective achieved well.
GESE tests for teachers. 8 teachers. Learning to communicate easily and clearly in English for 10 topics. 6 teachers achieved the objective well.
Banking activities. 3rd-5th standards. 40 students. Learning Objective: to learn to use arithmetical operations and activities fully correctly in a life context. Objective achieved sufficiently well.