My educational experience during pandemic

 Hello everyone...

                   This is Varunani Ra Na from Tamilnadu. Iam working as a secondary grade teacher in municipal primary school, Nagappattinam. Iam working with two more teachers in my school. Not only pandemic period a challenge for me, when I was in my first maternity leave many of my school kids went off to somewhere schools thinking that I left my school. When I was back to school I had to set things on its way. I planned to get my school kids and more kids back, so decided to have something special in my school.

          I had a meeting with my colleagues  and we planned to have a smart board in our school. With our local people's support we got a smartboard and its effective usage made more attraction toward my school. 

I attended a phonetic training in my district ( which is the continuation training by the master trainers who attended training in RIESI) which made me to dream about a language lab in my school. I began to work on my dream and created a SLAP LAB - Specialised language practice lab which has sections like intro corner - introducing phonic sounds using flex, techno corner - having tabs( affordable instead of computers)  and headsets in seperate cabins for hearing phonic sounds and language games using various apps, task corner - contains activites to enhance phonic sounds, words and transcriptions, readers corner - for reading various book after their knoweldge in words, cursive corner - to enhance student's lexical skill.

When we practice through this lab we can get a better output in language from our kids. That added more stars to our school and came in tv channels and Indian express newspaper too.

I planned to have an indoor sports room and achieved that too, it contains billiards board, traditional tamil games, boardgames and more to appreciate children's physical gaming instead of mobile games. We renovated our library too. I concentrate on everyday tasks and conduct more activities to my kids for their development. I was in my second maternity leave during the beginning of pandemic period. After joining back from my maternity leave I went school alternative days and issued textbooks to my children, made whatsapp group asusuall. I got a chance to participate in kalvi tv shoot to conduct lessons for primary school kids.

I used that opportunity to do my best to my state kids in this pandemic. I gave notification regarding telecasting time and issued my own worksheets to my class children to develop their basic skills on language and numerical ability. I distributed this worksheets as hard copies to those who are not having their smartphones. After some relaxations in lockdown I regularly visit my children's house in random manner to check their cleanliness and academics too. To take safety measure towards female children who are staying alone in home while their parents went to work, I asked them to come to school and made them read books like thulir, chutty yanai, thumbi ( children magazine we are subscribing). I worked together with my friends together in a team NAALAI and conducted book review and drawing competition to our district children through online.(article about my progress)

 I prepared myself for competitive banking exams in my college days I aware of competitive exams and join with our team NAALAI and had coaching sessions for  our block's eighth class students for NMMS scholarship exams during this pandemic.

And I know if another pandemic came, we all can manage with our experiences and this technologies but am sure there is no replacement for a primary teacher.

Thank you for sparing time reading my blog.

Regards

Varunani Ra Na

SGT, Nagappattinam dt.

Tamilnadu.

8883735333