On Wednesday, September 20, 2017, a workshop was conducted for teachers of Shriram Matriculation School, Thiruneermalai, Chennai by Ms V S Anuradha, Academic Advisor to Shriram Foundation, who has a post-graduate degree in Chemistry and Science. The objective of this workshop was to help teachers teach Science to elementary and middle-school children by demonstrating simple experiments in class.

Ms Anuradha started the session touching upon themes such as understanding the world around us, things we see in day to day life, application of the skills learnt etc. She added that the Science lessons must be activity-based, stimulating, enjoyable and exploratory, in order to be more effective. She also emphasized that a teacher needn’t have a background in Science to do this.

Ms Anuradha demonstrated a few experiments to the teachers that can be done with basic laboratory materials and every day household objects. It also focussed on how these experiments can be related to different principles of Science, which in turn prompted constructive discussions among the teachers who witnessed it. Some of the experiments included explaining air pressure with a balloon and bottle, spinning colour wheel to show blending of colours etc.

The workshop ended with a note on how conducting experiments in class encourages children to reason, innovate and develops their curiosity and interest in learning the concepts more easily.