Building Blocks


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EVENTS

Building Blocks

From Environmental Awareness to Action: A Teachers’ Manual

This manual, developed by CEE is primarily for use by teachers, and aims to strengthen greening through curricular and co-curricular activities. In addition to providing basic scientific information about environment related concepts and issues, it also gives conservation and management efforts. Activities and action projects which can be taken up by teachers with their students are described, and background reading for the teacher is also provided. The activities and projects could be undertaken as part of co-curricular initiatives, as part of eco-club activities, etc. Building Blocks has also been translated into Assamese, Hindi, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Telugu and Urdu. For Goa, no translation was done, but a supplementary booklet giving locally relevant information was brought out.

This manual is divided into two sections

Section I deals with eight themes

1. Soil 2. Water

3. Atmosphere 4. Ecology

5. Energy 6. Agriculture

7. Industry 8. Pollution

Each of the themes has a set of 5-6 activities. Following this, background information about that theme is given. This includes a discussion of basic scientific information, issues, as well as conservation and management efforts.

The themes and concepts dealt with in the manual occur in the textbooks. The activity ideas in the manual seek to focus attention on the environmental aspects and help students to understand the concepts in an active way. While the activities discussed in the manual are most appropriate for a certain standard e.g. Std. 6 or Std. 7, the activities can be modified/adapted to the content being discussed in the classroom and to suit the needs of students of other classes. For example, an activity like ‘Yesterday and Today’ in the Pollution chapter could be modified for water usage, energy usage, agriculture practices, consumption pattern etc. Activities relating to air, soil, water, agriculture could be linked to various chapters and taken up during the course of classroom teaching.

Section II discusses some of the action projects that students can take up with the help of teachers and school authorities. This action projects ranges from conserving water- making a compost pit- energy auditing. These action projects give students a first hand exposure to real-life situations so that they began to feel responsible for their immediate environment and realize that their actions can make a difference.

These activities and projects may also be undertaken as part of co-curricular initiatives, as part of eco-clubs activities, etc.