Educational fun: Four decades of shaping minds

Beaconhouse School celebrated this milestone by hosting a festival

KARACHI: To celebrate 40 years of shaping young minds and to give a view of the creative and innovative teaching methods to parents, Beaconhouse School System (BSS) southern region organised the Beaconhouse Early Years Festival, 2015.

The festival merged all the campuses under one roof to introduce parents to the technology used in the classrooms. Various options for early childhood education offered by Beaconhouse were showcased at the event. A separate section for arts and crafts was set up in the middle of the hall, which included paintings, colouring and pasting, while the teachers were helping the children with their projects.

To involve students, the festival also included a gaming zone outside the hall, which was one of the most crowded areas and included a jumping castle and rides for kids. "It looks like our school but a bigger one," said an excited student who was enjoying a motorbike ride with his brother.

To encourage the children to learn while enjoying the festival, BSS also set up many games, which stimulate the students' motor skills. Each stall had at least two teachers to help students complete their tasks such as matching, measuring and puzzle making.

"The main age group which we are considering today is from two to five years of age because we mainly focus on learning through technology at an early age," said a teacher who was helping a four-year-old measure using a tablet computer.

The festival's main attraction was a group of ten students, aged between four and six years, standing in a row, wearing maroon coloured sashes and singing 'we welcome you all' in unison. "These students are from the Gulshan-e-Iqbal Kindergarten-Three branch and have only practiced for ten days before performing today to welcome everyone," said the music teacher, Fawwad Rizvi.

"The event garnered an overwhelming response from the parents of Karachi and Hyderabad," said Beaconhouse regional director south, Asim Yakub. He said that the BSS was looking forward to hosting similar events in other regions as well.

Speaking about their future plans, Yaqub said that they will change the playing field by introducing more technology in classrooms to educate students in a better way. "Today, more than 0.2 million students are in the loop of BSS and, in this era, children don't learn from books but from technology," he explained. "We want our students to be digitally literate, creative, innovative, analytically ethical and resolute," claimed Yaqub.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 9^th, 2015.