English Schooling Blog
To streamline learning and communicating in English, we’ve remodelled lessons for our students who rarely speak the language at home. It facilitates learning with ease and speaking English with self-assurance.
As English is foreign to most Isha Vidhya students, the school offers customized lessons to ensure learning occurs comfortably. In the primary classes, English lessons begin daily with singing rhymes and progress to conversing, learning sight words, reading, and writing. While weekly evaluations ensure steady progress, peer learning and diverse activities support positive progress in grasping the language.
Read how these varied activity-based lessons are helping students communicate competently in English.
Hopping to Revise
LKG students of Isha Vidhya Dharmapuri hopped on alphabet flashcards placed on a spiral line and called out the alphabet when they jumped on one. The game-like revision activity was exciting and fun.
Acting to Learn
Class 1 students of Isha Vidhya Tuticorin staged the story ‘Big Mouth’ as part of a Power English lesson to help them develop expressive reading and acting abilities. Two students excitedly played as geese and another as a tortoise.
Rhyming Words in the Veranda
The Class 1 teacher at Isha Vidhya Dharmapuri placed a word chart with missing alphabets on the veranda and encouraged students to practice spelling in their free time. Students freely stopped while passing by, chose from multiple alphabets hanging alongside the chart, and enjoyed brushing up on their spelling skills.
Hopscotch Sentences
The Class 4 teacher at Isha Vidhya Dharmapuri placed objects at the start of a unique word hopscotch and made the students pick an object and hop through apt words to form a sentence relevant to the object. It helped them create multiple sentences with limited words and improve their language skills.
Nouns in the Newspaper
The newspaper became a textbook for Class 5 students of Isha Vidhya Salem when they read the newspaper and identified common and proper nouns in the news articles. Learning from a newspaper was absorbing and offered a new avenue to explore reading.
Playing Pictionary
Two teams of Class 8 students of Isha Vidhya Dharmapuri contested to guess the word from the illustration that the opposing team drew to match the new word given to them. The game was fun, and students quickly reinforced their vocabulary through picture associations.
The Whole Story
Class 9 students of Isha Vidhya Dharmapuri made a booklet of a story they wrote and illustrated, including a table of contents and glossary. The elaborate activity developed their literary and artistic skills and yielded a sense of fulfillment in accomplishing the creative project.
English Drama Lesson
The teacher of Class 12 at Isha Vidhya Salem explained the play, ‘The Hour of Truth’ by Percival Wilde, and encouraged her students to script it by referring to their textbooks. It helped them enhance their vocabulary, learn new idioms, and deliver the dialogues uninhibitedly and spontaneously while enacting the play.
Circulating Library
The library at Isha Vidhya Nagercoil houses over 4400 books that students access during their weekly library periods and breaks. The librarian helps students choose and borrow two books a week to foster a love for reading, learning, and curiosity. A valuable outcome is that students eagerly share their stories at the assembly.
