A mindful teacher can propel children’s freshly learnt concepts to deepen and strengthen by giving multiple application and practice tasks from a variety of contexts.

Mrs. Mehra is a hard-working teacher. After all, she is an experienced teacher in Your Own Progressive School, a school that put high stakes on students’ learning and prided itself for being a school that engaged all children without fail.

Chintu in Mrs. Mehra’s grade 3 is a secured and happy child. He would be excited about anything and everything. Give him a challenging task and he would go like a rocket. Chintu is Mrs. Mehra’s inspiration to raise the bar of quality of tasks for her class.

Mitva on the other hand is a lovely and gentle child. She likes to do things at her own pace and in her own ways. Any abrupt change in a routine task or an unfamiliar context would increase her anxiety. She is Mrs. Mehra’s greatest motivation for reflection and innovation in creating support. Mitva keeps Mrs. Mehra on her toes…a challenge she takes willingly, to give a task that is exactly a little above Mitva’s level of learning, but not too high lest it increases her cognitive overload and makes her anxious and dysfunctional.

Sapan is an unusual child in grade 3. He appears slow in uptake, often takes longer than the other children, very focused in class (many times you might wonder whether he is awake) and he rarely interacts with other students. He is timid in nature when it comes to play sports, specially the competitive ones. Sapan has difficulty in remembering too many facts, but understands concepts well and applies them with remarkable sensitivity to the context. Mrs. Mehra struggles to get him to give quick answers to recall questions, yet Sapan is her delight when she poses a complex problem in the class, looks hopefully at him, and marvels how Sapan loses himself in cracking it. To keep Sapan engaged and continuously learning, Mrs. Mehra has to do a lot of thinking and research.

Learners are different. We know that. They need different treatment to grow in their unique ways, at their own pace. We know that too. It is a teacher’s job to do justice to every child’s unique learning. Yeah yeah…we know that too.

But what we don’t really know is HOW in Dewey’s name does a teacher ensure that each one is challenged adequately so they are engaged and actively learning all the time!!
We have been struggling to respond to that question, often inadequately, but relentlessly.

One of the things I discovered in my first year of teaching is that a good worksheet can be a great instrument to engage a variety of learners in any classroom. Much respected Mr. Sripada Rao, my headmaster would sit me and help me make worksheets to engage my class. He would often say, ‘Vishnu, if you keep making these worksheets, you will soon become a good teacher’. Over the years, through my journey as a teacher to school head

and eventually full-time teacher trainer and curriculum designer, my team and I have worked extensively on creating these tools for learning. Since we follow the Experiential Learning Methodology, we introduce these worksheets for the explicit purpose of applying the concepts that learners have formed in the class. Thus, we call these Practice Sheets.

In honor of the benevolent and compassionate Mr. Sripada Rao, I offer these Practice Sheets to the fellow teachers with one expectation- promise me that you will not miss the glow on the children’s face when you see them absorbed as they work on these sheets!

I invite you to visit Propel’s website to download many more practice sheets organised according to grade, subject and unit.

Let each child experience joy as she applies her learning!