ASSETScope August 2013

The monthly newsletter

Issue 95 | August 2013 | www.ei-india.com

This Month’s Issue Educational Field Trip ..... 01 Poem ............................. 02 Thoughtful Story ............ 03 Workshop ....................... 04 Teacher Student ............. 05 India’s Deadly ................. 06 Teacher’s Bite ................. 07 ASSET Poster ................... 08

Educational Field Trips Memories of school Educational trips are among the most prominent of the formative years, largely because they are a welcome break in the routine for both students and teachers. While their purpose is essentially to educate, they can also be a bonding experience for everyone involved.

Going on an Educational trip means more than simply leaving the school grounds. It not only focuses on a major educational element, but also develops life skills such as, problem solving, relaxation and interaction.

Advantages of Educational trips: Retention and Reinforcement Trips reinforce the concepts of various subjects and create “episodic memories,” helping children retain information for longer periods.

Field Trips bridge the gap between education and hands-on experience.

the day. Taking students into a new environment gives them the experience of traveling in a group and teaches them to respect each other and the locations they visit. Students may also get to interact with students from other schools as they participate in group activities Learning Styles Educational trips will often cater to more than one learning style, making them excellent teaching tools for certain students. Classroom lectures apply primarily to audio learners, who learn best by listening. Visual learners can benefit from visual aids, which are much more frequent during an Educational trip.

Finally tactile learners can avail of an uncommon opportunity to perform hands-on learning.

Sense of Community

Teachers turn trips into mobile classrooms, instructing students to collect data, quizzing them or assigning a project based on what they learn during the outing.

If your Educational trip is to a local destination, students will gain a better understanding about their community.

This sometimes boosts the students' interest in being an active citizen to help preserve the specialty of their community.

Socialization and Fun

Classroom Inspiration

No matter how much students learn during an Educational trip, their favourite memories would be their enjoyment of

A student who sees, touches and smells historical relics, ancient artifacts and

Engagement

original sources of text becomes motivated to learn more in depth when he returns to the classroom. Educational trips stimulate learning beyond what textbooks and videos can provide to the learning environment. Well designed excursions result in higher levels of academic achievement in every subject of study.

Connection to Community For low-income students or new students, Educational trips take advantage of local resources to promote community connectivity. For example, a student may not ever have the opportunity to visit a local park or bank important resources within a community for both the student and his family.

Students from non-English-speaking families or who are new to the neighbourhood, get the chance to learn about the local area with the guidance of their school.

Educational trips are therefore educational experiences that allow students to apply their lessons to the real world and tend to be the most memorable moments of a student's career.

Poem Black is the colour of sorrow and pain Black was the colour outside the rain The sky above was deep black As the train moved along the railway track Mother Nature seemed fast asleep Thoughts arose in my mind, dark and deep The stillness of the trees, the silence of the seas Through my hair flowed the cool scented breeze Suddenly the clouds tore apart A ray of hope touched my heart The first rays of the sun sparkled the stream It was more beautiful than the most beautiful dream Birds began to fly as came the dawn With a lot of hope, a new day was born Within a few minutes, my destination I reached I realised how much a small journey can teach.

- Shweta Kallapur, ASSET Ambassador

Women in History

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas in 1898. She spent her childhood in Kansas, Minnesota and Illinois. In 1920, she took her first airplane ride. She loved flying and began taking flying lessons. At that time, women pilots were very unusual. When Amelia earned her pilot's license in 1923 she became the 16th woman in the U.S to have her license to fly.

In 1932, Amelia was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.

She flew with another pilot, Wilmer Stultz. Amelia became very famous for this flight. When she came back to America, she was honored with parades and met President Coolidge.

In 1932, Amelia flew across the Atlantic again, this time by herself. She was the first woman to fly alone, or solo, across the Atlantic. For this, Amelia received the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress, the first woman to receive this honor.

Amelia Earhart

Amelia broke many records for distance and speed. She was the first person to do many things, such as fly from Hawaii to California.

In 1937, Amelia tried to break another record. This time, it was to fly around the world along the equator. She and her crew member, Fred Noonan, took off from Florida on June 1, 1937. They flew across the Atlantic, Africa and India. When they reached the Pacific, they had radio trouble and were low on fuel. The plane disappeared on July 2, 1937 with Amelia and Fred on board. They were never found.

Amelia's life encouraged many other women to become pilots. She also educated the public about flying and airplanes.

Thoughtful Story NO ONE KNOWS WHAT YOU ARE CAPABLE OF, EXCEPT YOURSELF! This is one of the SADDEST stories ever told in Hollywood.

His name is Sylvestar Stallone. One of the BIGGEST and MOST famous American Movie superstars. Back THEN, Stallone was a struggling actor in every definition. At some point, he was so broke that he stole his wife's jewellery and sold it. Things got so bad that he even ended up homeless.

Yes, he slept at the New York bus station for 3 days. Unable to pay rent or afford food. His lowest point came when he tried to sell his dog at the liquor store to any stranger as he didn’t have money to feed the dog anymore. He sold it for $25 only.

He says he walked away crying.

Two weeks later, he saw a boxing match between Mohammed Ali and Chuck Wepner and that match gave him the inspiration to write the script for the famous movie, ROCKY. He wrote the script for 20 hours! He tried to sell it and got an offer for $125,000 for the script. But he had just ONE REQUEST. He wanted to STAR in the movie. He wanted to be the MAIN ACTOR. Rocky himself. But the studio said NO. They wanted a REAL STAR. They said he "Looked funny and talked funny". He left with his script. A few weeks later, the studio offered him $250,000 for the script. He refused. They even offered $350,000. He still refused. They wanted his movie, but NOT him. He said NO. He had to be IN THAT MOVIE.

dog and begged for the dog back. The man refused. Stallone offered him $100. The man refused. He offered him $500.

And the guy refused. Yes, he refused even $1000. And, believe it or not, Stallone had to pay $15, 000 for the same, same dog he sold at only $25! And he finally got his dog back!

And today, the same Stallone who slept in the streets and sold his dog JUST BECAUSE he couldn’t even feed it anymore, is one of the GREATEST Movie Stars who ever walked the Earth!

Life is tough. Opportunities will pass you by, just because you are a NOBODY. People will want your products but NOT YOU. It’s a tough world. If you ain’t already famous, or rich or "connected", you will find it rough.

Doors will be shut on you. People will steal your glory and crash your hopes. You will push and push. And yet NOTHING WILL HAPPEN.

After a while, the studio agreed, gave him $35, 000 for the script and let him star in it! The rest is history! The movie won Best Picture, Best Directing and Best Film Editing at the prestigious Oscar Awards. He was even nominated for BEST ACTOR! The Movie ROCKY was even inducted into the American National Film Registry as one of the greatest movies ever!

It happens. Yes, it does.

And do you know the first thing he bought with the $35, 000?

THE DOG HE SOLD. Yes, Stallone LOVED HIS DOG SO MUCH that he stood at the liquor store for 3 days waiting for the man he sold his dog to. And on the 3rd day, he saw the man coming with the dog. Stallone explained why he sold the

BUT NEVER LET THEM CRUSH THAT DREAM. Whatever happens to you, Keep Dreaming. Even when they crush your hopes, Keep Dreaming. Even when they turn you away, Keep Dreaming. Even when they shut you down, Keep Dreaming.

And then your hopes will be crashed. You will be broke.

Damn broke. You will do odd jobs for survival. You will be unable to feed yourself. And yes, you may end up sleeping in the streets.

News Bite Online Learning Course for 11m CBSE Students

Over 11 million students are likely to benefit from the Central Board of Secondary Education's latest initiative "personalized learning solutions" to help bridge the digital gap and offer online learning resources to the tune of one lakh questions, over 4,500 animations (animated content), 80 hours of live lectures and six hours of simulation lab in digitized. The major beneficiaries will be around four million students from government schools affiliated to the Board as these resources will be made available free. Even for public school students this content prepared by five international and national publishers will be available for as low as Rs 2 per

month for classes I to VIII and Rs 10 per month for the secondary level.

The initiative is to roll out from August 2013.

CBSE has empanelled five publishers - both local and international to offer online learning-aids for its students and to enhance the learning of the students under continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE). The idea is to standardize the quality of education across the country in its schools through these standardized resources.

Workshop on Best Practices in Mathematics Workshop on Best Practices in Mathemactics was conducted at Shanti Asiatic School, Ahmedabad on 20th July by Ms. Ranjani Mitra, from EI. The objective of this workshop was to share ideas, approaches and experiences of best practices in Mathematics by Maths teachers of Shanti Asiatic Schools and DAV School in Ahmedabad.

Teachers shared their experiences on how they handled their Maths classes in terms of student motivation, attention, engagement and performance. They also shared two life practices which enabled them to empower their students with Maths learning and skills.

The sharing experience revealed that the use of manipulative, activities, games and Maths lab makes it possible for students to learn with guided enquiry and exploration.

The essentials of teaching Maths were discussed with examples. Explorative techniques like visiting banks to introduce concepts in Commercial Maths were highlighted.

Other techniques like using inventive methods with creativity, inculcating reasoning and analytical skills in students, encouraging an informal and open atmosphere with students sharing their observations and the teacher acting as a facilitator or a guide, to result in correct conceptual understanding, were some of the ideas covered. An example of a creative method is allowing students to envision and draw pictures of a world with no straight lines to understand the importance of lines and angles A mock session of teaching ‘Lowest common multiple (LCM)’ to Grade 4 students was conducted by Ms Ranjani Mitra. The session basically emphasised the process of experiential learning of Maths skills in a classroom.

The session began with a game played with two teams of students who had to hop in multiples of 3 and 4 across a series of numbered circles. They had to then observe on which common numbers they met after beginning together at 0 and then had to identify the number where they will meet the earliest. The game can then be repeated with multiples of 5 & 7.

This could be followed by smaller group activities where

situations on LCM like the one below were given: ‘I go to the park every 2 days and Lata goes to the park every 3 days. On which days will we both be together at the park? To be followed by, When is the soonest we will be in the park together?

The next question asked can be - Rohan and Raj go to the Mela that has both a large and a small Giant wheel. Rohan gets on the large Giant wheel at the same time Raj gets on the small Giant wheel. Determine the number of seconds that will pass before Rohan and Raj are both at the bottom of the Giant wheel together again….

Students were then briefed with the procedure of calculating LCM with factorisation and division methods as they work with a partner. For assessing the understanding and application of the concept, the students were then given individual assignments to create their own real life situations where LCM was or could be used.

It was unanimously concluded that a successful Maths learning session allowed the students to understand Mathematical concepts, compute/calculate fluently, develop reasoning skills to solve problems, apply concepts and procedures and most importantly engage themselves in Maths learning.

Teacher-Student Interactions: The Key to Quality Classrooms By: University of Virginia Centre for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning

anger, hostility or aggression exhibited by teachers and/or students in the classroom; Teacher sensitivity – teachers’ responsiveness to students’ academic and emotional needs; and Regard for student perspectives – the degree to which teachers’ interactions with students and classroom activities place an emphasis on students’ interests, motivations, and points of view.

The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) describes ten dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and social development. Each dimension falls into one of three board categories: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.

Every day, teachers make countless real-time decisions and facilitate dozens of interactions between themselves and their students. Although they share this commonality, educators all over the country often talk about these decisions and interactions in different ways. The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed at the University of Virginia’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning, helps educators view classrooms through a common lens and discuss them using a common language, providing support for improving the quality of teacher-student interactions and, ultimately, student learning.

How is the CLASS organized?

The CLASS describes ten dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and social development. Each of the ten dimensions falls into one of three broad categories: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.

Classroom organization refers to the ways teachers help children develop skills to regulate their own behaviour, get the most learning out of each school day, and maintain interest in learning activities. This includes: Behavior management – how well teachers monitor, prevent, and redirect misbehavior; Productivity – how well the classroom runs with respect to routines, how well students understand the routine, and the degree to which teachers provide activities and directions so that maximum time can be spent in learning activities; and Instructional learning formats – how teachers engage students in activities and facilitate activities so that learning opportunities are maximized.

Instructional support refers to the ways in which teachers effectively support students' cognitive development and language growth. This includes: Concept development – how teachers use instructional discussions and activities to promote students’ higher-order thinking skills and cognition in contrast to a focus on rote instruction; Quality of feedback – how teachers expand participation and learning through feedback to students; and Language modeling – the extent to which teachers stimulate, facilitate, and encourage students’ language use.

Emotional support – refers to the ways teachers help children develop warm, supportive relationships, experience enjoyment and excitement about learning, feel comfortable in the classroom, and experience appropriate levels of autonomy or independence. This includes: Positive climate – the enjoyment and emotional connection that teachers have with students, as well as the nature of peer interactions; Negative climate – the level of expressed negativity such as Source: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/28812/

Fun Zone Teacher: How can you distribute 8 apples among 6 people equally?

Student: By making Juice.

You can share your favourite joke/s at assetscope@ei-india.com. We will be glad to publish it.

India’s Deadly Problem With School Meals The Bihar deaths are part of a national crisis: a policy meant to improve nutrition and school attendance has gone badly wrong

The death of 22 Indian children in Masrakh, a village in the north-eastern state of Bihar, due to poisoning from their school lunch, has caused global outrage. Riots have broken out in the district, with distraught parents and relatives wrecking the school kitchen and torching police vehicles, while the state government tried to insinuate that it is a political conspiracy to destabilise them in an election year.

The fear is that attention is being diverted from what is an acute problem in many of India's state-run or state-assisted schools. While the ruling party in the state looks for excuses, the harsh reality is that food provided to children all over the country is often substandard, and sometimes not even fit for human consumption.

Snakes and worms have been reported in Mid Day Meals, and adulteration has been said to take place as well. Barely were the children in Masrakh rushed to hospital – where over 60 of them are still unwell – when news came from another part of the state that 15 more children had been reported ill, after a lizard was suspected to have fallen into their lunch. Meanwhile, in the western region of Maharashtra another 31 children contracted gastroenteritis after consuming their school meals.

in particularly impoverished areas of Mumbai, schoolteachers have found that the children resist eating the food, because it is such poor quality.

Aware of the constant complaints, the central government had thought of replacing the hot food with prepackaged meals. But there have been instances when even biscuits given to the children have made them dangerously ill.

Despite all of this, for some peculiar reason, the government has not taken into account the views of the scheme's stakeholders: the children who are recipients of this deadly state-run charity.

Even when the children in Masrakh started complaining of stomach pain while eating the food – it is now suspected that organo phosphorus pesticide was responsible for the deaths – the school head teacher allegedly forced them to finish the meal. She has now fled. The number of deaths has sadly risen because there were no medical facilities near the school either.

The Mid Day Meal Scheme was introduced to ensure that a hot cooked lunch would be provided to government supported schools. The meal was meant to contain at least 300 calories per child, with 8-10g of protein. The policy was welcomed as it would mean that the children, many of who come from the most vulnerable sections of society, might attend school because of it and also receive some muchneeded nutrition. It is estimated that approximately 100 million schoolchildren are fed through the scheme. But unfortunately, the leakages and corruption in the system are said to be equally as large.

The problem is that both in the acquisition as well as in the delivery mechanism corruption is abound. Most of the food is acquired from the Food Corporation of India, also in the spotlight for its less than satisfactory role in the Public Distribution System, which provides rationed grain at special rates to those who live below the poverty line. While the government gets ready to unveil its flagship food security bill next month, under which 60% of the population will receive food every month at highly subsidised rates, it is unclear how it will ever ensure a corruption-free system where the food actually reaches the people who need it most. Nor can they ensure its quality. Even in the Mid Day Meal scheme, which is far more targeted and could be monitored easily, there is little evidence to suggest that school children are actually getting any nutritional value from it at all.

Studies in selected districts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have shown that only 75% of the requisitioned food is usually doled out to the children. There are also issues of cleanliness.

Often the cook hired for the task (at a salary of around £10 per month) is sometimes not paid for months at a time. Even

While Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, has just announced the princely sum of Rs 2 lakhs (£2200) for every family of a child that has died, the fact remains that these underprivileged children have become victims of these free school meals, rather than its beneficiaries.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Teacher’s Bite Mr. N. Srinivasa Murthy, Director, A.A.N.M. & V.V.R.S.R High School, Gudlavalleru

Q:

Who has most influenced you to become an educator, and how did they influence you?

Mr.Ankineedu, my English Teacher, Mr. R.Lakshmaiah and Mr.S.Poornachandra Rao my Lecturers in my graduation and Post Graduation have most influenced me by their commitment, continuous learning and concern for students who learn English. I have been successfully serving as a justifying English Lecturer for the last 32 years thanks to what I imbibe from my mentors.

Q:

What is your approach to classroom management and student discipline?

A teacher should be knowledgeable and realistic to interpret the subject in the way that reaches the mind and the

heart of the students. Then classroom management becomes easy and successful which in turn ensures the self – discipline of all students.

Q:

What are your views regarding the ‘Importance of Teacher Training and Development’ in educating students?

A teacher needs to refine his subject knowledge and teaching skills continuously so that he can keep his students fit for any challenge in study, professional and social life over generations.

So, the teachers positively make use of teacher training programmes for their individual and students’ progressive academic pursuits.

Q:

What is your view regarding the ASSET Test?

The ASSET Test is unique by itself in scientifically identifying the subject, analytical and applicative potentialities of students right from their primary classes and helping them gradually overcome the lapses and drawbacks, by the time they complete their studies with confidence.

http://www.ei-india.com/register-for-asset-question-a-dayaqad/

ASSET at New Era School, Vadodara We at New Era School have always believed and liked the pattern of Questions which are asked in the ASSET. The reports sent are also detailed and they not only help the students but also help the teachers in re looking to their way of transacting a particular concept.

For the students’ reference this year, we have decided to compile all the questions of the ‘ASSETQuestion- a- Day’ and give them as handouts to the students. The questions will be discussed in the class and the students will solve them for their homework. The next day the concerned teacher of that subject will discuss the answers in the class.

Pradnya Gokhale, Coordinator, New Era Senior Secondary School, Vadodara

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