Writing what’s Necessary for Students to Grow & Learn

“What we don't know is much more than what we know.”— (Albert Einstein)

Published in

Writers’ Blokke

10 min readSep 27, 2021

Note: The study fields and methodologies below are most applicable to primary (5–8th) and secondary (9th — 11th) classes.

Hearing the title may seem odd as majorly, people are satisfied with the education system in schools but are they the knowledge that can help students pursue their career??? I highly doubt it.

As the world is expanding with different areas to be explored, many new strategies have been made to promote conceptual learning effectively. The schools have been giving the same education as taught earlier before back to 30 years which needs some consideration. Since everything is getting smart and updated, why not our mindset too?

What my child really needs to know & study?

All of us wants our children to be much successful, intelligent, brighter and skilled with one step further than us and all our motive is to provide almost everything we can do to make their lives better.

Dearing hard workers and caring parents, to help your child study what is needed, here are some of the advanced fields students should get some learning and have some grounds roots required to help them decide their career along with improving study techniques.

1) Budgeting

Say what? children are too young to study it! Why would children study budgeting? — Now all these questions might come to your mind but do you know what is so interesting about kids:

“They are very smart and quick to learn it.”

According to Teachers Columbia University, the creativity of children causes the prefrontal cortex of the brain to give them the ability to think creatively and be innovative ideas.

The most important thing students should be taught in school is “Budgeting”. Budgeting means “to create a priority, wish and savings list” that helps a person spend and properly invest money. The above picture clearly explains how students shall make a budget and how they use their pocket money properly.

How to Teach this?

Now the major concern is how to teach it what our course outlines. The best thing to make this course interactive and less competitive is to:

Paper-free: With this, there will be no competition among students to get further studying in memorizing traditional study. Instead of taking final examinations and assessments, students shall be engaged with several activities and role-plays that helps in various factors: acting skills, purchasing skills, confidence, posture, presenting and communication skills that help in building a good character.
Role plays: students shall be engaged with several ‘ play ’ activities by giving some situations like doing a grocery, shopping, how to invest, how much to save to buy a Playstation can be some of the situations to involve all students and get active participation.
Group and Individual Tasks: By providing group tasks as well as individual activities, students would find to work in all situations and will improve in giving organized work.
Smart purchasing: The prime goal of this course is to give the knowledge and sense of smart grocery. There are millions of products in malls and grocery stores that make you buy more while not being necessary. As a result, money spent is considered as “waste” with purchasing unwanted products. Making a smart list will give the concept of the prior things needed for your home grocery and how to purchase it to the minimum possible.
Criteria of Judgement: The overall standard of this course should be based on the stats of learning student has acquired through the course. Tasks, presentations, group/individual activities, discussions and concept brainstorm shall be graded to be encouraged. With this standard, students will wisely invest and understand the importance of ‘money.

Result:

Students will become smart in spending money wisely and properly. Also, some of the students interested in maths, statistics, problem-solving can be given some basic career counselling as to how they can enter fields like marketing, Business Administration, Accounts, Finance or even data analytics to show how much potential they have.

2) Algorithms and Coding

According to my perception, the logic building is the most essential tool schools should highly emphasize. That’s where algorithms and coding come into place.

You guys would be wondering “has this person got mad!”. Indeed, it seems advanced along with providing MS-Office products knowledge but students should be taught some coding and algorithms with in-trend languages like python and R which seem pretty simple and easy for students to get interacted. In addition to it, students start thinking analytically and offer solutions to the problem.

If this didn’t give you a clear idea, see the procedure of learning given below which holds the outline of the course.

How to Teach this?

Basic coding: This session involves doing basic code by taking input, printing or doing some arithmetic operations. Some of the exercises can be making a mark sheet of 5 subjects, printing tables of numbers and student information.
Conditional Statements: Conditional IF-ELSE statements come into action when you need to apply some conditions in a scenario. (Ex: If a movie is for above 13, children with age<13 are not allowed). Giving scenarios of several real life makes their brain do more thinking.
Functions: Functions topics shall be taught on a small scale as this comes with further complications while adding more concepts to be implemented. By creating a fruit store, you need some functions that display the menu, purchase customer, receipt and others functionalities.
Recursion: This is known as self calling a function without any loops and includes scenarios like printing tables without multiplication. Now without multiplication may seem tough but we can do it by using addition and do self calling till it reaches a case where you don't need to take any further action. Also, in recursion, we can apply functions and conditional statements — except loops.

If not Languages like python are difficult to teach, they can also teach HTML and CSS to show their web skills which are much better than GW-BASIC.

Note: To persuade students, the course should be taught on a projector with a live demonstration of how this is happening. By keeping lightweight on course, the school will receive a highly effective response.

RESULT

Logic building skills will be heavily enhanced after this course. Curiosity starts to begin after these courses. Along with it, students will be benefited if they pursue programming or CS career and most importantly they would logically and analytically.

3) Languages

Yup, Languages. We people speak in our native language and need some platform to communicate. English is almost taught in every country which makes 2 languages but here is the surprise.

By offering the language courses in School, students can communicate in other languages as well including Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, German, French and Chinese — depends on what language you can make available to students but the most important thing is to create strong roots of your native language as this reflects you being a faithful citizen of the country.

See this 4-year girl speaking 7 languages — Fantastic!

Bella Devyatkina can speak 7 languages — Video from “Little Big Shots”

How to Teach this?

Note: The language course is not an easy one to grasp. Thus, It should be taught at 3–5 years to make students grasp on it which may even help them in their career life.

Criteria of Offering: Students currently in grade 6 can be offered language courses. From class 6, the course outline can be made well structured while covering all necessary topics with easy learning.
Basic Level: Certain entry-level grades determine how well you know the language. A-1 or some other notation level of language will cover topics including pronunciation, names of animals and other things, accent, environment, sentence formation and clarity of speaking shall be covered.
Moderate Level: With time to time, language courses may modify the level by extending some of the topics with advancement.
Advanced Level: This level is all about fluency and the command you have finally got in the language. Whatever the language is studied, this should be tested to check student performance and how well the course has benefitted.

RESULT

With no doubt, you will see your child very fluent in speaking other languages like a Native person. Furthermore, the certificate will also help him in the future while applying for jobs and making it a bonus that might lead them to Good companies with big benefits and handsome packages.

4) Farming

Ok, wait! “F-A-R-M-I-N-G”. Readers might get astonished hearing it and might ask Why farming should be taught?

Before we talk about it, the common perception of people after hearing the word Farming might be “Cows and goats in farms, the dumps of the animal being used in plant fields as natural fertilizers, artificial irrigation, crop fields, dairy products, fresh and tasty fruits and vegetables and lot of hard work.” Pretty well summarized as to what the glimpse of thoughts hit me after hearing this word. What’s your first thoughts after hearing “farming”. Comment & Mention us your thoughts by starting as “Farming- ”

To all those thinking, I appreciate you all for thinking the reasons and considering the results after doing it. The answer is quite simple: food and dairy products are a part of your daily life and by learning it you can grow your fruits, vegetables and other products while cutting the cost of spending stacks of cash on purchasing them.

You would be surprised enough as this course is all about the mixture of entertainment, vision, innovation, knowledge and wisdom with smart and effective strategies to give all sorts of skills in the best possible way.

How to Make it Interesting?

This course should be taught in all seasons including the summer and winter breaks as this gives the knowledge of how to apply farming at home with no problems and having all necessities at your home without purchasing it at expensive rates.
Entertainment: Several site tours on fields and farms will be planned to give them practical knowledge and how these products are processed and supplied.
This course should be taught on a future perspective scale as this can change the students choice for opting careers.
Knowing which vegetables and fruits can be easily grown at home without any problems. If you have a lawn/garden, that’s great as you can easily grow some of the plants there. While if you live in an apartment or have limited space, you can buy some pots to plant it.
With not limited to fruits and vegetables, students will also be demonstrated knowledge about flowers, dairy products, and dry fruits.
What’s more interesting is students will be allowed to use social media to show their work and their trips. Along with it, there will be live demonstrations and tutorials played on the projector to show how can farming be inventive.

Contents

Fruit farming: growing apples, bananas, strawberries, blueberries, zucchini, squash, apricots, blackberries,

fruit farm at home from “5-minute crafts”

Vegetables:

With many channels providing great content regarding vegetable farming, We recommend checking 5 Minute crafts, Urban Gardening and Blossom to get the most advanced and easy techniques to grow vegetables at home.

Links:

1) https://bit.ly/3tSD7SR (Blossom)

2) https://bit.ly/3ExMZX0 (5-minute crafts)

Urban Gardening

Flowers: Roses, Sunflower, Marigold, Jasmine, Lilly, Tulips, Orchids, Daisy and many more can be grown in homes to create a natural and fresh environment, bringing happiness to life.

Grow flowers for a fresh environment; Tips by 5 Minute Crafts

Hopefully, with many tutorials on the internet, students will surely get to know the importance of farming after doing it with today’s methods and trends that boosts the growth of crops.

5) Soft Skills

Last but not the least, “Soft skills” are the essential components for students dealing with daily life problems. As well described by thebalancecareers.com, soft skills are referred to as the non-technical skills that relate to how you work. These skills include how you interact with colleagues, how you solve problems, and how you manage your work depending on:

Result

By applying these soft skills, many problems can be solved easily as they are highly demanded in every era of life. From Management and customer service to packing, plumber, electrician, sales and marketing, soft skills are a major key component in our lives.

created with Canva: https://bit.ly/39mTAVS

CONCLUSION

To conclude it all up, providing and encouraging these subjects in schools along with other subjects will change the traditional method of learning. Although the list of courses might excel but with effective planning, the courses can be offered within limit along with providing the required knowledge parents wish to provide their kids.

Surely, indeed with these courses, the intelligence, interpersonal & intrapersonal skills will sharply improve resulting in making their school time memorable and worth the quality.