Interactive Geography Lessons for Roma Kids
Could geography be interesting for students from Roma schools in Bulgaria? Most Bulgarians whould say it could not. But let’s change a little the way we think about it.
Vesselin Kissiov teaches about Africa.
Durung the summer we continue our study room in our center in the Roma district, but in a different way. The study room is in the morning and only for mathematics and Bulgarian. The afternoons are for improving the student’s knoledge about some school subject. Last year we did interactive lessons in history of Bulgaria and the interest of the students was encouraging. Because of the interactive method, we were able to hold their atention easy even for 50 minutes lessons.
Now we decided to enrich their knoledge in geography of the world. Again we had many advantage on our side, compared to their schools. The students are in our center voluntary. They also know that after every lesson there are games prepared. We do not use their textbooks, but select the exact information, which could hold their attention and interest. The lessons are always with presentations. We project maps, photos, parts of documentary movies etc. – Virtually everithing that we say, we show them.
Mount "Chirpan", Livingston island, Antarctic ("Chirpan" is a town near Stara Zagora)
We do not alow part of the lessons that could be cosidered as boring. For example, many people would not be interested in a lesson only for Antarctic. But this changes if you see the name of your city, town or even village shot on place in the Antarctic. This is because if the Bulgarian explorers in the region, who offically named hundreds of places.
The new country South Sudan - created a week bofore our lesson about Africa.
We use additional motivation for holding the attention. After the lesson is finnished, there is a little test on 4-5 things from the lesson. But there are not bad grades. Even the test is voluntary, but we have never had someone who have refused it. The first three with thrue answers receive aditional points for the day and sometimes – another educational prize. For example, after a lesson for the European continent, the additional prize is on a computer game about the countries in Europe, the first winner to succeed quessing correct the countries. And because it is projected, all the others also benefit. After we have the winners, we give the correct answer, so this serves as a kind of conclusion and recall. Thus it is well remember becuase of the student’sattempt to guess it alone during the test.
We see that this educational method alway enrich the knoledge of the students and in some of them it creates a real interest to the subject.
Vesselin Kissiov
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