A day with Government school children: Speaking on water issues

We have been engaging with couple of government schools in and around Bengaluru International Airport for the past couple of months. The engagement is not limited to hard infrastructure components like rainwater harvesting but also involves lot of soft components to create ownership, handholding of the system for teachers and students.

It was one of such sessions with Kannur Primary School and Kadusonnapanahalli High School. In Kannur, the students were from 1^st to 5^th standard whereas in Kadusonnapanahalli students of 10^th standard attended the session. The interaction focused on water cycle, facts about water, water scarcity, and briefly touched upon water scarcity and necessity of conservation. The session was mix of sharing videos, talking and interaction. 

Projector set up at Kannur School

The smiles on the faces of small kids, especially the primary school kids, makes your day. Principal Ma’m of Kannur Primary School, Ms. Manjula said, “Students are always happy to see something on big screen. It just cheers them up and a good way of teaching them.” While we had videos to be shown, we couldn’t get a video projector on time before the session. Kadusonnapanahalli school had it in house so we weren’t worried about it. But Kannur we weren’t sure. We reached the school and started talking to the Principal Ma’m about showing the videos and she delightfully says, “We have a projector.” She showed the projector and the set up and it was the most amazing thing that I could have seen. The school is selected for ‘Meghshala’ project which uses audio-visual methods as learning aids. 

The whole set up comes with a small portable projector, a Wi-Fi dongle, tripod, portable speaker, and a tab with in-built lesson plans. Projector also has a USB port and USB chord to connect the speakers. This is such a useful thing for the schools to have. Though the teacher still doesn’t feel comfortable with using the this, and sometimes struggles with using USB, this learning method has certainly caught the students’ attention. Kudos to the team. If you have some information about such projectors, price, we would like to explore more.

Kadusonnapanahalli school had its own set up and multiple options to project. A big TV screen connected to a DVD player which somehow couldn’t be used that day. A wall mounted projector wasn’t working. Finally, we used portable solar powered projector donated to the school by Rotary.

We sourced videos available freely on the web platform. We especially thought the video by Agastya International foundation on Water cycle was very useful. For one, it was in Kannada so students could follow it and second, it was activity based so student understood the concept.

We are planning next sessions on Rainwater harvesting, water demand, sanitation and hygiene. Keep following this blog to be posted about our next interactions.