Kids Make A beeline to Lohit Innovation, Improve Attendance

OUR CORRESPONDENT

ITANAGAR: In a novel initiative to make the classroom teaching-learning process more interesting and to check students’ attendance rate as well as do away with space problem in schools, the Lohit district administration in Arunachal Pradesh has come out with an idea of ‘School on a Bus’ by using condemned buses as classrooms.

In one such initiative, the students of Government Primary School at Thowang, a remote village in Wakro circle of the district, are being taught inside a beautifully painted bus with various colours.

“The initiative has not only solved the problem of classroom on a temporary basis but is also infusing an element of fun and interactive learning in the school,” official sources from the district said.

It said the idea propped up from the school visit which exposed the problem faced by the children who are taught in combined classes. Another worrying factor was low-attendance in the schools because of several reasons, one among which may be the mundane and dull school environment.

“To make the fun-bus classroom a reality, some renovations were required, and it was done through painting the bus with the learning themes such as putting the pictures of directions of that particular place, political map of India, national animal, parts of body and a route to reach that school from district headquarters to quote a few,” the sources said.

With this intervention, children started staying in school even after school hours. The attendance has improved up to an extent that even children from nearby villages are coming to this particular school rather than their own neighbourhood school, the sources added.

The little students of the school not only spend their time on this bus-classroom; rather they ensure that the bus remains neat and clean. They have taken a pledge to perform better to get more such buses in future. They are elated as they got something which fused fun with learning in an innovative way.

The district administration is looking for identifying more such buses which will be located to several other schools in order to promote fun learning and improve the attendance rate in future, the sources added.

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