PUPILS PROVE TO BE A SOURCE OF MATERIALS!!

As I go round schools both primary and secondary schools the need that comes loud and clear from the teacher’s lips is lack of text books and to a greater extent, they are right for text books are the main source of teaching materials.

Are you aware that pupil’s can be a source of materials? Not easy to believe but its true!

I happened to visit Canon Apollo Demo School and was lucky to find a P.6 teacher conducting a library, lesson. Wow! That was wonderful for I had never attended such a lesson in my entire life.

I looked around the library; there were not many books that really struck my eyes. Many looked like donations that had no relation to the Ugandan curriculum.

As you very well know, most primary school pupils cover their books with news papers. These are the very materials that the teacher used for his lesson!

He asked pupils to unwrap their English language exercise books. The few exceptions who had not wrapped their exercise books with newspapers were allowed to unwrap a non – language Exercisebook.

Instruction one was “class look at your papers what can you see?”Hands went up! Pictures had caught almost every one’s eye. So, they went on mentioning what they could see. Some saw people, others bicycles, cars, houses, trees and so on and so forth.

Seeing their attention was mainly on pictures, he changed their attention to words .So instruction two was “Look at the words and only pick out words whose meaning you do not know?” They responded by picking the words pronouncing them the way they could and writing them in their exercise books. One pupil made the class burst with laughter when he read the word curriculum as “KULIKULAMU”

The teacher explained the meaning of these difficult words and asked pupils to construct sentences using the same words. He gave them freedom to either construct sentences using the newly learnt words or to describe one of the pictures of their choice.

To my astonishment, three quarters of the class took to describing the pictures. Some even drew and traced them in their exercise books which he collected at the end of the lesson. 

I noted the pupil who had picked the curriculum word had written a composition about the Ugandan curriculum sighting out its pros and cons!

My assessment of the lesson was that pupils had one: - enjoyed themselves and had been given chance to discover and be creative.

Two: - that “free-lance lessons” made the teacher cover wider rangeof topics within a very short time.

This reminds me of the 2012 joint teacher- pupil instructional material development exhibition that amazed many parents and stake holders of the district.

Story writing,calendars, clocks, art pieces and so on and so forth were some of the materials made by both pupils and their teachers.

This was a non-text book exhibition with a clear message that pupils with diligent and passionate teachers produced better work. We can say that non text book material can be made and used if the teachers are creative and passionate about what they are teaching and secondly, pupils can do a lot under the supervision of their teachers. A competent teacher can use anything to conduct a well balanced lesson rich enough to make pupils improve on their literacy and numeracy levels.