: Using Junk Scrap, Award-Winning Kashmiri Teacher Helps Poor Kids Learn Creatively #IndiaNEWS #Development On a bright Saturday morning, 49-year-old Roohi Sultana dressed up for one of the biggest

Using Junk Scrap, Award-Winning Kashmiri Teacher Helps Poor Kids Learn Creatively #IndiaNEWS #Development
On a bright Saturday morning, 49-year-old Roohi Sultana dressed up for one of the biggest achievements of her life. A teacher at the Boys Middle School, Kashipora in the outskirts of Srinagar, she was conferred with the national award by President of India Ram Nath Kovind.
Roohi, the winner among 107 nominees, had been selected for her unconventional teaching method of using household waste as teaching tools.
A postgraduate in Urdu and the Kashmiri language and a renowned calligraphy artist, Roohi was among the 47 recipients of the National Teachers Award from across the country.
I cant express my happiness. It is all thanks to my students, who cooperated with me and adapted to my style of teaching. The education department and my family supported me to go through various challenges throughout this journey, she said.
Roohis innovative method of teaching

Soon after joining the education department as a teacher, Roohi was selected for a teachers course of Art Integrated Learning by the National Council of Educational Research and Training.
While all the attendants in the course focussed on the improvements in methods of teaching, Roohi was highly impressed with the play-way method, demonstrated by one of the senior professors. This method uses tools to make a long-term impact on students, helping them grasp concepts better.
Roohi wanted to adopt these techniques for her students, who mostly came from underprivileged backgrounds.
What perturbed Roohi was the cost of the tools. Her students couldnt afford any of them.
Rather than give up, Roohi decided to experiment and make education tools out of household items.
She started collecting scraps and littered items including soap covers, chips wrappers, empty tetra packs, mango seeds, plastic bottles and even thermocol packing material to modify them into various tools.
My days would end by collecting all these littered items and visualising their modification to make them into something I could use to teach students. I would visit shopkeepers and ask them for empty plastic bottles, and biscuit and toffee wrappers, Roohi said.
The use of these items was a challenging task for the calligraphy artist, who used her creative bent to make attractive tools of them.
I would take all these littered items to my home, wash and dry them. With the help of my students, I successfully gave all these items the distinctive shapes of education tools, she said.
While she used thermocol as a chart, materials like plastic bottles were painted with alphabets, and soap and chips wrappers were modified to help students to understand mathematics.
I used shells of walnuts and pistachios and fixed them to their original shape.