Category: Schools

The Team had a wonderful evening filled with strategy games and puzzles at isaimbalam school. The 5th graders had a sleep over which ended with a English movies (cartoon). The evening started with a bonfire, then came the puzzles and games.

The children learned to play Abalone and Othello. (Favorite hits in STEMLAND 🙂 )

Naveen had brought the materials to build Aravind Gupta’s Toys from waste materials. The children enjoyed constructing them and saw how they functioned.

We had studied the human body, with the 6th grade students of Udavi school. The children had made the Skeletal structure in groups of two, they also did projects on the Digestive system on how food is processed by our body.

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After a long time I got a opportunity to work with Physics materials… This week I planned to take Light lesson to 7th graders of Isai Ambalam. I’ve started with mind map for Light and then moved on to mirrors. Later I asked the students to look at their text books’ pictures ( Light lesson) without reading anything and then we started a discussion on ‘ What did I get on seeing the pictures?’.  It was a nice discussion where all the students started to say something related to the light and mirrors. They even talked about virtual oasis condition and stated it as a virtual image (thus they almost covered the Light lesson’s concepts which given in their text book).

I brought some lenses and mirrors ( both concave and convex )from STEMLAND . It made them to observe the differences between Concave and Convex  lenses (or mirrors). We did few experiments with light. These brought me to my childhood days.. Next day, a student ( Praba karan) brought a broken torch light and told that ‘ This must have made by Concave lens as it is spreading out the light everywhere’. Totally, my class on Light went well with these kids… I also felt something different this time.

The 6th grade students had a lot of fun interrelating fractions and angles. They took various fraction pieces and estimated and checked themselves the corresponding angles using the fraction kits. Once done, they figured out a game that they played by calling names of fraction and the others estimation their corresponding angles.

Sanjeev has started an electronic class for the children who come for their activity classes on Saturdays. Children got so excited learning on how to properly use the multimeter. They learned how to calculate the Resistance, Voltage, and check the connectivity of the circuit.

In fact students learned that the multimeter can actually go bad if you don’t use them properly.

A small theory section was added to make the class more informative. Students got that Voltage and power are not the same.

Then they measured voltages of few old batteries and resistance of some resisters. A 9th student even showed how to find the continuity of a circuit using a multimeter.

The children were given a scenario where they had to equally cut pencils and place it in their geometry boxes. They did not physically cut pencils but used papers instead.

The question given was : Cut 5 pencils and place them in 4 geometry boxes equally. Initially they had some difficulty in placing the pieces equally in the boxes. But once they figured out a pattern in their mind, they began to make different questions themselves and  solved it.

Once they got a good handle of the procedure, they didn’t need the pencil(paper) and the geometry boxes anymore.

They also drew pictures of pencils and geometry boxes in Scratch and demonstrated how they split the pencils equally into the boxes.