HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank releases eight weeks alternative calendar for Primary stage

Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank today released eight weeks' alternative academic calendar for Primary stage.

This Calendar contains detailed guidelines for teachers on the use of technology and social media tools to impart education while the students are at home. The calendar further aims at empowering students, teachers, school principals  and parents with positive ways to deal with COVID-19  via online teaching-learning resources and achieve the best possible learning outcomes.

Speaking on the occasion the Minister said that this Calendar provides guidelines to teachers on the use of various technological tools and social media tools available for imparting education in fun-filled, interesting ways, which can be used by learner, parents and teachers even while at home. However, it has taken into account, the varying levels of access to Mobile, Radio, Television, SMS and various social media.

The fact that many of students may not have internet facility in the mobile, or may not be able to use different social media tools, the calendar guides teachers to further guide parents and students through SMS on mobile phones or through voice call. Parents are expected to help elementary stage students to implement this



Calendar.

Mr Nishank further said that this calendar caters to the need of all children including Divyang children. It includes links for Audio books, Radio programmes and Video programme. He said that the calendar contains week-wise plan consisting of interesting and challenging activities, with reference to theme and chapter taken from syllabus or textbook. Most importantly, it maps the themes with the learning outcomes. The purpose of mapping of themes with learning outcomes is to facilitate teachers and parents to assess the progress in the learning of children and also to go beyond textbooks.

The calendar also covers experiential learning activities such as Arts Education, Physical Exercises, yoga, pre-vocational skills, etc. This Calendar contains class-wise and subject-wise activities in tabular forms. It includes activities related to four languages as subject areas - Hindi English, Urdu and Sanskrit.

In a statement, HRD Ministry said all the given activities are suggestive in nature, not preive, nor is the sequence mandatory. Teachers and parents may opt to contextualize the activities and do those activities that the student shows interest in, irrespective of the sequence.