The future of our world are the children. However for them to have a future worth living in, we have to raise them better than we were raised – it would be great to make them more aware of how important it is to protect the environment, to create a better world. This is my opinion, but it is also included in Poornodaya Vidyanikethan’s (PV) philosophy. Therefore I am very happy to be a part of this school for 6 months as a volunteer.
PV tries to teach in an alternative way for Kerala and by an approach trough holistic education. This holistic learning is one that nurtures the broad development of students through equal emphasis on intellectual, emotional, social, creative, spiritual and physical potentials. Furthermore in my 3 weeks of working here with children and the other teachers, I have seen what an impotant role nature plays at PV. Teachers always try to give lessons which make it possible for the children to learn in close proximity to nature. The school intends to have as little negative effect on the environment as possible. This covers obvious things as recycling and limited creation of waste, to the way we treat plants and animals. Children as well as teachers should not bring plastic to school, and parents are asked to have little packaging in the lunch boxes for their children to create limited rubbish and to discourage such wasteful industries. Teachers encourage children to treat any animal with care, and more to just observe them rather than always touch and capture them. For the lessons and also for play school, teachers/mentors use as many natural materials as possoble, for example reusable or directly from nature. In many occasions or events children are encouraged to treat plant-life with care and attention. Especially in October nature will play a even bigger role, according to this months theme: “Nature is honest, connect children with nature“.
On this years “World Nature Day“ Poornodaya Vidyanikethan organised a Flower Show to make the children aware of the beauty of nature and this is one way to connect them with it.
We had almost 60 varieties of flowers. We teachers collected as many different and interesting flowers as we could find, Miniature Pala,Yellow Marigold, Orange Cosmos, Roses, Hydragenea, just to mention some, and arranged them in front of the school. So in the end we had a quite big amount of flowers, could interest the children in flowers and teach them some names and in addition our school entrance looked really beautiful.
The whole day I had this quote in my mind, which the principle told me once: “Connect children with nature, because little nature lovers become big nature lovers“. This emphasises once again the importance of this day and our “Flower Show“. Although it started raining after a while, the children had enough time to enjoy the flowers and the flowers were happy about the rain.
It’s an unarguable fact that much more than any other species in the world it’s human who has harmed nature the most. In search of „modernization“ we have often overlooked the balance of nature. This resulted in environments that are polluted for our own living. People are getting to understand how worse the situation is and World Nature Day is one step towards preserving nature.
Zoë Bader, Germany
Poornodaya Vidyanikethan