Various Approaches of Lesson Planning

1. Pre-operational stage:

At the stage a child begins to construct sentenced. He learns to respond to the external world by means of symbols. He does not view his worlds as composed of Constants, Properties of objects; do not remain invariant for him.

He does not have concept of conservation and is prepared by perception. Preoperational children cannot understand Science and mathematics concepts unless they do activities with concrete objects several times by their own hands.

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2. Formal operational stage:

At this stage a child exhibits the ability to form hypotheses and deduce possible results from these hypotheses. He can think in terms of all possible combinations for a given problem and he can function at an abstract level without. The necessity of perceiving the objects.

Formal operation children can understand Science concepts even without doing activities with concrete objects by their own hands. It implies from Piaget’s work that at primary school level most of the children will be either at pre-operational stage and very few will be a formal operational stag.

Therefore majority of primary school children will be unable to understand Science concepts and skills without working with concrete objects. Therefore, manipulating the objects, observing and performing experiments are very essential for primary school children in order to learn science.

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3. Concrete operational stage:

At this stage a child begins to structure basic ideas of conservation in the sense that certain properties of objects remain invariant. At this stage a child must have real objects upon which to operate both physically and mentally. The child can organise data from objects which are present in his immediate environment but he cannot formulate generalizing hypotheses or concrete operational children cannot understand Science and Mathematics concepts unless they do activities with concrete objects at least once by their own hands.

4. Sensory- Motor Periods:

Mostly activities and no thought highly dependent on parents for satisfying its physical needs- not self conscious limited linguistic ability and so mainly performs overt activities. The gains of this stage may be stated as follows-

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i. Variety is available patterns of action, the growing recognition of symbols, rudimentary projecting of time, as well as increased accommodation stress the internal aspects of the child’s prospective behaviour.

ii. The recognition of a particular stimulus as a part of an entire action sequence introduces the use of symbols as a kind of shorthand to comprehension, and leads eventually to communication. This early awareness of stimuli as symbols also serves as an introduction to a sense of future.

iii. Awareness of time very vague before and after and in each action sequence.

iv. This co-ordination of separate experiences into one scheme makes the child realise that he also is part of the action.

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v. Various response pattern are finally fused into a single.

vi. Qualitative evaluation finds their roots in this simple experience.

vii. Reacts to distant objects- beginning of the differentiation between cause and effect takes place.

5. Piagetian Approach:

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Jean Piaget was a biologist and naturalist interested more in Psychology. He was a specialist in the area of cognitive development. He choose problems for investigation from the area of cognition without considering at the same time, any other outside variables like intelligence, socio-economic status, personality treats and even motivation.

He acknowledged his debt to Gestalt psychology in his thinking. He did not use standardised procedures and did not explain many of his concepts. His approach is elastic and flexible. He was interested in successive cognitive structures in the whole process of autogenetic development among normal children.

Through the use of symbolic logic, Piaget is able to discuss the properties of thinking at various age levels in terms of what operations children within the age group are capable or incapable of performing.

Unit Planning :

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Actually this approach is associated with the name of Professor H.C. Morrison of the University of Chicago. Morrison has explained the unit method in detail in his book “The practice of Teaching in Secondary Schools”. A unit may be defined as means of organising materials for instructional purpose which utilises significant subject- matter content, involves pupils in leaning activities through active participation intellectually and physically and modifies the pupil’s behaviour to the extent that he is able to cope with new problems and situations more competently.”