Hyderabad: NCERT wants both parents, teachers busy with students

Hyderabad: Sensing that parents are not going their offices and schools are not opening in near future due to the Covid lockdown, NCERT has designed an Alternative Academic Calendar (AAC) which involves both teachers and parents in teaching the students at home.

By this Alternative academic calendar, the National Council of Educational Research and Training(NCERT) wants parents to give quality time to their wards studying at home during the troubled times of Covid pandemic.

The AAC prescribes a range of activities week by week for whole months covering verities of themes of different subjects. Teachers, parents and guardians can discuss how to go about it and come up with solutions to give their best to the students of primary classes.

To teach shapes, the parents and teachers can discuss how to teach them with the available resources available at homes.

For example, you can discuss with the mathematics teacher of your son, daughter or grandchildren about how you can teach a circle, of 360 degrees using a roti you make at home for breakfast. By slicing it into two parts, to teach the shape of 180 degrees and making into four parts is what makes it a 90 degrees shape.

When it comes to counting numbers the AAC suggests that you can use grains and pulses. A parent and guardian can take their wards to the kitchen or a bag of rice and guide them counting numbers along with them. Or, you can do sums and subtractions. The suggested package of themes for a Class 1 students comes with encouraging to learn activity-based physical attributes such as shape, size and other observable properties including rolling and sliding, recites number names and counts objects up to 20. Besides, describing the physical features of various solids and shapes in her own language using buckets, trunks and other material objects available at your home.

Further, means of the delivery of all this teaching-learning by the teacher-parent model, the AAC suggests can be done by using mobile. And, through WhatsApp, telegram, SMS, tele-calling. Also, to use, Facebook and other social media platforms, depending on the accessibility by both the teachers and parents.

But, at a time when teachers across the schools are complaining that they are not paid salaries, who would bear the mobile bills for all this activity remained a million-dollar question.