Activities and Experimentation Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The learning is meaningful if the teacher encourages her/his children to observe, share their experiences followed by discussion on the activity.

Observation alone gives raw experience; sharing lets children compare what they noticed, and discussion helps them make sense of it, for example how ants find the sugar and work together. All three steps together turn an activity into learning.

The first two options stop at one step each, and giving questions for home moves the reflection away from the shared experience in class.

Answer: A

The one that is not a process skill is retrieving facts.

Process skills are the skills of doing science: observing, classifying, measuring, predicting, experimenting, analysing, discussing and drawing conclusions. Experiments with water, such as testing what floats or dissolves, develop exactly these.

Retrieving facts is recall of information already learnt. It is a product of learning, not a skill used in carrying out an investigation. Analysing, discussion and drawing conclusions are all process skills.

Answer: D

The key gives C and D.

Identifying plants blindfold by the smell of crushed leaves (C) makes children notice that plants differ even in features they cannot see. Collecting leaves of many plants and arranging them into pictures (D) makes children handle and compare a wide range of leaf shapes, sizes, colours and textures. Both are first-hand activities with real plants.

Looking for leaf patterns printed on household objects (A) is about designs, not living plants, and listening to a poem (B) is passive, so options including A or B are less suitable.

Answer: A

The teacher wants to develop observation and classification.

To collect different types of leaves, children must look closely at size, shape, colour, texture and edges (observation) and decide which leaves are alike and which are different (classification).

No experiment is involved, so 'only experimentation' and 'experimentation with leaves' do not fit. 'Only classification' leaves out the observation the task depends on.

Answer: A

Writing poems mainly develops creative expression.

Composing a poem asks children to put their own observations, feelings and imagination into words. Expression, including creative expression through poems, stories and drawings, is one of the process skills NCERT's EVS approach aims to develop, along with observation, discussion, classification and questioning.

Motor skills are physical, so writing a poem is not mainly about them. 'Learning skills' is too vague to name a specific process skill, and convergent thinking seeks one correct answer, the opposite of an open, creative task like a poem.

Answer: D

The objective is to engage children in exploratory and hands-on activities to acquire basic cognitive and motor skills through processes of observation, classification and inference.

This is one of the general objectives of teaching EVS in NCERT's syllabus. Watching the mirror mist over when breath falls on it lets children observe, question and infer that exhaled air contains water vapour.

Explaining hot and cold air or inhalation and exhalation are narrow content goals of this one activity, not general objectives of EVS. 'Demonstrating experiment to the children' describes what the teacher does, not an objective for the children's learning.

Answer: D

The debate helps students in appreciating multiple perspectives on this issue.

A debate puts forward arguments on both sides of a question, such as cleaner air against the cost to transport, livelihoods and goods movement. Its purpose in EVS is to develop critical thinking and an understanding that environmental issues involve competing views.

Using the debate to persuade students that diesel vehicles must be banned, or that modern vehicles are better, turns it into one-sided teaching. Using it to find out students' views in order to 'correct' them treats their opinions as errors instead of respecting different viewpoints.

Answer: D

The most suitable activity is organizing a field trip to a nearby place.

On a field trip children see, hear, touch and smell, and sometimes taste, the things they are learning about, and they can move around and explore. No classroom activity engages so many senses at once, and it works with a large group, since every child experiences the place directly.

A resource person's demonstration engages mainly sight and hearing, and in a class of fifty most children watch rather than handle. Group discussion is largely verbal. Smart-class audio-visual material, as its name says, involves only seeing and hearing.

Answer: B

The skills developed are questioning, inferring, expression.

In a survey students frame and ask questions of families, record the answers, look for patterns (for example, larger families using more water) and draw inferences, and then share their findings orally or in writing, which is expression.

A survey involves no experimentation, since nothing is varied or tested, and it does not start from a hypothesis or a prediction, so the other three options do not fit.

Answer: B

The most appropriate objectives are (b), (c) and (d).

A zoo visit should help children relate what they see to concepts about animals, such as food, habitat and movement (b), practise process skills like observing, questioning, comparing and recording (c), and let the teacher assess their learning as they work in a real setting (d).

Merely recalling the names of animals (a) is rote learning that a classroom list could provide, so it is not one of the most appropriate objectives of a field trip.