Our school conducts several field trips and activities for us throughout the academic year. Last year we were taken out on trips not only to the neighbourhood Nature Park but also to the Museum, Planetarium, Aquarium, Parle factory, Science Centre and more. We got to visit a police station, a bank, a post office, we interacted with fire-fighters, we explored an abandoned quarry to learn geology, we collected insects and examined them, we saw and experienced things that were in our textbooks …and we learnt a lot from each experience.
This year has been no different, we have already been out on many excursions and now that the monsoons are over and the weather has become more pleasant, we will be taken further afield, on even more field trips.
Besides just taking us out of campus, our school conducts activities on campus for us that continuously aim at teaching us through experience. Our Diwali Mela was one such activity, planting trees on campus, decorating our classrooms, the Social Studies Exhibition, acting in plays, participating in recitations, baking cakes, a treasure-hunt to learn map-reading, 'Splash' for Kindergarten and Std I&II, Monsoon Magic, the ongoing Kindergarten fancy dress competition, the list goes on.
We have cleared plastic not only from our beaches but also from the quarry area, we have gone bird-watching, we have planted trees in the quarry and at school, we have been to a factory, we have been to farms and interacted with paddy farmers, we have been to the hospital, the market, the jetty, we have even tried our hands at nature photography…the list is almost endless. At the same time we have managed to keep pace with academics, studying our textbooks diligently and striving to do well at school.
What does it mean to have so many activities at school? It means that we learn through experience what is taught to us in our books. No one can learn from books alone, not even grownups – imagine learning how to drive a car from textbooks alone - experience is a part of learning! When we have hands-on learning, our minds are open to experience, we analyse and question everything, and that is true learning. We children learn through our senses, we like to participate, we like to see and touch and feel our environment so that we can use every part of our brain to learn our subjects – we do not truly learn just by reading about things in books.
Enacting our English Lessons last year in class
Taking bark-rubbings to understand trees
Our very first activity this year was to decorate our classrooms and each of us worked really hard to make decorations for our class, which our teacher proudly hung up for us – what did we learn? We learnt to take pride in our environment, to be proud of our classroom, to care for school property (and therefore public property), we learnt that if a place is kept well decorated and clean it is more cheerful, and in the end we gained by each having a gorgeous classroom to learn in. Our classrooms still look beautiful, because now we cannot take for granted the lovely cheerful space that has been provided for us to study in, so now we maintain it.
Our Classrooms
Around the same time as the classroom decoration activity, we had ‘Splash’, for all the kids from Nursery to Std-II. We were asked to bring our swimming costumes to school and then we got to splash around in paddling pools under the big banyan tree at school. It was so much fun! We learnt as well! We played with sponges, balls and cups in the water, learning concepts like heavy and light, what floats what sinks, empty and full…during 'Monsoon Magic' the school babies from kindergarten donned raincoats and splashed about in puddles in the rain, then made paper boats and set sail to them in our paddling pools after which everyone sat around under the trees and enjoyed hot pakoras! It is sometimes the simple things that make our school so much fun!
Splash NCS
Splash NKG
During our ‘What’s Cooking’ activity, each and every one of us at school baked individual chocolate brownies… 170+ children baked 170+ brownies! It was super fun! And the cakes were delicious…because we baked them with our own hands! What did we learn? We learnt that anything is possible! That even a six year old in Std-I can independently measure, mix and bake his or her own cake, we learnt the science of measuring and mixing different ingredients to make a final product, we learnt how to bake- some of us had baked for the very first time in our lives…and we each got to carry home our own hand-baked brownie!
When we visited the quarry for the first time and saw all the plastic left behind by adults, we were very sad by their irresponsibility, but managed to quickly clean it up completely! The second time we visited the quarry, it was clean thanks to us, and so we planted trees there. We once visited a beach which was full of plastic that had floated ashore from Mumbai, and under the careful supervision of our teachers we attempted to clean that as well…but there was too much plastic even for our dedicated little hands to clear…but what did we learn? We have been learning that plastic is a global problem and that we need to stop throwing plastic away – we need to recycle it, we saw with our own eyes the problem of plastic pollution, we witnessed and experienced how terrible it can be. We are the future and our future at the moment seems crammed with plastic litter unless we do something about it now…we learnt to be responsible citizens when we cleared the plastic, we learnt that we should use less plastic and that recycling is a good alternative – and honestly, each one of us felt so good having done it, we felt like we had made a difference!
We celebrate every festival at school – be it Janmashtmi or Baisakhi or Eid or Christmas. We do not do much extra on that day, the school time table remains the same, studies go on as usual, but we come to school dressed up for the occasion, we distribute sweets and learn the significance of the festival. Why? Because ours is a secular country and the future of this country is based on mutual understanding and tolerance – these festivals are not someone else’s festivals, they are ours collectively, and we understand that when we celebrate them collectively.
Celebrations!
Every month we are taken to watch a movie at Shivaji Auditorium, it is a private-screening privilege offered to few and we cherish the experience. The movies we watch are carefully chosen to impart special values to us – be it protecting trees with the Lorax, beating life’s odds with Stanley, valuing family and friends with the Ice-Age gang or protecting the environment with Wall-E, each movie has a meaning and when we sit together as a collective group of children and watch movies with these values, we gain something more than just entertainment.
When we participate in recitation competitions or act in plays or dance performances at school, which we do on a very regular basis, we are learning to let go of the fear of coming up onto stage, we learn to present ourselves to others. We are honing our talents and opening doors to creativity and confidence that we never thought we had. Our SST exhibition helped us learn that we could speak with confidence even in front of adults whom we did not know.
Building Confidence
When we participate in creative competitions at school like best-out-of waste, rakhi-making, card making etc. we are tapping into the part of our brain that will stand by us later in life once we are grown up and our jobs require for us to be creative or think out of the box – these are life-skills that we are learning. A few of us worked really hard to make what we call ‘Pangaea’ the enormous model at our sand-pit of all the geographical features on earth - besides learning about mountains, plains, plateaus and seas, we learnt so much more during that experience, including teamwork, creativity and out-of-the-box problem-solving.
Our Diwali Mela was an activity designed purely to boost our life skills and confidence, and to teach us the vital math skills necessary for accounting, returning correct change and managing profit and loss – on that one day we learnt skills that will stay with us for life.
Our school keeps adding activities and excursions to our schedules if it can help us better understand a particular chapter, and so as a result we are often taken on spur-of-the-moment field trips or pulled out of our classrooms to experience our chapters through surprise activities – shore-bird-watching at the jetty for example when we were learning about birds, visiting paddy fields when we were learning about crops and agriculture, a visit to the nature park to observe plants for one of our EVS chapters, a visit to our neighbourhood when we were studying that topic, a visit to the hospital…and so on –recently we even sent up hot air balloons (each child in Std-V got their very own hot-air balloon to send up into the atmosphere) because we were learning about the properties of air – we will never forget now that air expands when heated and becomes lighter and rises up!
It has been proven that active kids have a better IQ and that children learn more when they participate and understand; we retain better when we experience. Our horizons are broadened when we learn through doing and in the end it makes learning fun. Unless we have fun while studying, unless we enjoy and love our subjects, we are not really learning; we are just opening our books every day only to forget what we have studied once the chapter is over. Of course books are important, and we love our books - even more so now that we can understand their contents better through experience.
Now that December is almost here and the weather is cool and calm, we will be going out on more field-trips - some nearby and some to Mumbai – we hope to visit many new places and learn many new things in the months to come and we look forward to many new adventures and activities in our journey of knowledge!
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