Friday, November 27, 2015

Teaching Science through Stories (Part-1)

Children love stories. They love to hear and read stories. Parents and teachers should make use of this fact to teach science concepts. We can teach scientific facts and concepts through stories with ethical and moral values.
Story- telling is an ancient art. People around the world have always told stories to pass on culture, tradition and history to their next generation.  Learning moral values through stories is easy. Similarly learning scientific facts through stories is interesting to children. Stories are the tools in the hands of a science teacher.
Human brain can store stories for many years. Think of the stories our grandparents told us. They are remaining fresh even today after so many years. If the scientific facts are not co-related with a story, there will be loss of information. That is why children are not able to reproduce the laws and the principles at the time when needed. They fail to understand the application of scientific concepts in real life.
When children listen to stories or read stories, they are emotionally involved in it. The stories go straight to their hearts. They develop a positive attitude in the learning process. They develop a sense of joy while learning. Hence, difficult facts of science can be  made easy through stories. Motivating and initiating low-caliber students to learning is easy through story- telling.
The teacher should introduce the lesson with a story. The stories can be interactive. They can be in video format or it can be even simple power point presentation. It can be just a narration. The teacher should introduce the scientific facts during the course of telling the story. Then children become curious to learn the lesson. Stories kindle the imagination of children. They go beyond their means to learn. They try to apply in real life also.
In this method of teaching and learning process, the group members are sharing knowledge amongst themselves with their teacher. The imparting of education is through collaboration with other members through conversation, discussion, etc. Story- telling is the effective tool in imparting science education.
Right now, what we can do is to reformat the science textbooks with related stories. Children story writers should write stories linking moral values and scientific concepts. When children listen or read stories with science related moral stories, they imbibe moral values without questioning. Another important benefit is that they hear stories and learn science simultaneously.
A story connecting scientific facts and moral values in picture form will be published in my next post.

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