Teachers In Maharashtra's Solapur Paint Walls With Graffiti To Teach Students With No Internet
A school in Maharashtra's Solapur city has found a new way of imparting education by painting walls of houses in the vicinity with lessons from textbooks.
Young and marginalised students are facing the brunt of COVID-19 pandemic like no other. While schools have been shut for months, inaccessibility to smartphones and internet is a huge factor where these children lag behind.
To bridge this gap, a school in Maharashtra's Solapur city has found a new way of imparting education by painting walls of houses in the vicinity with lessons from textbooks.
Around 300 outer walls of various houses in Nilamnagar area of Solapur have been painted with simplified lessons from textbooks of various subjects of Classes 1 to 10.
This makes it convenient for students to go and stand in front of a particular wall to revise the lessons while following the social distancing guidelines, Ram Gaikwad, a teacher from the Asha Marathi Vidyalaya primary school in Nilamnagar of Solapur told PTI.
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Nearly 1,700 students from nearby areas study in the primary school and its secondary section Shri Dharmanna Sadul Prashala.
Gaikwad said these students come from poor families as their parents are labourers, mostly working in textile units of the district.
"Online education is the new norm in the current COVID-19 situation for which smartphone with good internet bandwidth is a must. But, the parents of majority of our students do not have smartphones or any other gadget, so online classes is a distant dream for them," he said.
Hence, the school came up with the idea of painting walls of the houses located near the educational institution with lessons from textbooks, he said.
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"We painted contents from textbooks on the walls of houses in Nilamnagar by making them simpler, comprehensible and interesting. Students, as per their convenience, now go and stand in front of the walls following all the social distancing norms and revise the lessons," Gaikwad said.
The lessons painted on the walls include introduction to letters, numbers, word and sentence formation, grammar, mathematical formulas, general knowledge and lessons from various other subjects, he said.
The school is also conducting online classes for students who have smartphones or other gadgets at home, Gaikwad added.
