PUPPETS AND MASKS
Character Glove Puppets, or spoon puppets, or bag puppets, and masks are ideal teaching and communication aids for anyone working with young children or patients. The joy of hearing a story being read can be greatly enhanced when a character from the story is brought to life in the form of a puppet - used by the reader to animate the tale. Similarly, a sensitive message can be explained using the character glove puppet as an effective communication medium.Young learners like to identify with animals or fantasy characters, which makes a glove puppet an ideal medium for increasing their motivation. The teacher can use it to ask children questions or to act out simple role-plays with them.
Wooden spoon puppets, bag puppets, sock puppets, and masks can be half-prepared, so that the children can hand finish them with their own designs. They are cheap and readily available materials.
Examples of resources
(one box of resources to be distributed to each school at the training session). Resources would to be collected, prepared, and itemised at the centre. Some materials also able to be purchased in Kathmandu. (A box of resources was costed at £240 in Sri Lanka).
masks from cardboard template
Other art and craft activities might include model making in clay/plasticine, stencils, collage, finger painting, printing, and plaster of Paris. A box of resources for approximately 45 children would be important to enable the teacher to teach in her nursery class.
Little Flower Nursery near Pokhara, Nepal, try Montessori methods with resources from SHIVA Charity.
PROPOSED NURSERY AND PRIMARY TEACHERS' RESOURCES TRAINING IN POKHARA NEPAL
In Nepal, if you have passed SLC exams (GCSE O'Level) then you are considered able to teach in most primary schools, often without any training at all. Most children, even at nursery level, are sat in rows while the teacher "chalks and talks". As there is little or no equipment, lessons are boring and repetitive.
SHIVA Charity desperately needs to construct a teachers' resource centre, and concentrate on providing educational equipment at the primary and nursery levels.
There is no point just delivering materials, however, and a programme of resources training needs to be put into operation, using the same process as we have already used in Sri Lanka.
One proposed site for building the centre is above the Project Managers house in Pokhara. Here materials would be safe and guarded, and Pokhara is an ideal centre for this type of project, with scores of poor schools that need help, within easy reach of this building.
Building the second storey would cost £12000.
