CHILD CENTRED LEARNING APPROACH IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS

The main reason children learn Environmental Science(ES) in primary schools is for the to develop an enquiry mind. Learning through doing is a golden rule in Education process.The child is happy to explore his/her own environment to develops the feelings of achievement , understand and appreciate what he/she discovers for him/herself as a personal worth.The more senses a child uses in learning the better he/she will understand and remember. Pupils reinforce and revise what is being taught , oftenly they apply knowledge learnt to life experiences.
ES gives the child an opportunity to grow and to learn in his own way and to provide each child with suitable experience at the precise moment of his/her needs. Since children learning is based on doing it is more interesting and enjoyment when children are associated their playing activities with discovery,exploration and experimentation using touching ,feeling and seeing a variety of objects. Activities can be used in different ways develop a skill such as reading ,drawing and singing.
Child centred approach is taking a pattern of learning when the teacher considered his/her planning content to be taught with the learner in mind .Starting from what is known by the children and go from there to new ideas that they should also identify their present interests and organise for them to develop those that are productive so as to lead to new interests.
A reflective teacher should watch the time when the child is ready to assimilate new experiences before introducing new task. Teaching should be as concrete as possible and as related to examples within their local environment experiences as possible to avoid rote learning.
In addition child centred approach should also involve pupils in learning by doing ,a method which uses more than one of the senses in the process of acquiring knowledge. The learned content should be at the level of their learners' cognitive level and must be within their immediate environment.
The classroom atmosphere must be relaxed and conducive for happy moods of all learners. Hence lessons should reflect the different needs of different pupils' views. There should be more pupils' activities than teacher's activities. The pupils' activities in their learning should be accompanied with a variety questioning techniques,free use discussions and exploration methods.
Groupwork must cater for different needs of different learners. The teacher must have an awareness of each individual learner 's needs ,weakness and talents.
The teaching and learning media should be plenty of visual aids in current use and should be displayed .The section for displaying children's work must be bright and colour to arouse their interests in presenting good work and every child 's work must be given a chance to be displayed so that he/she feel to do much better as a learner.
Many interesting learning areas ,for project work ,science laboratory, nature area around the school environment ,discovery section,library,creativity corner etc.
Children need to discover new knowledge through investigation ,experiments and exploration. So that they applied the knowledge learned to useful ends such as care of animals ,garderning ,capentry ,modelling etc.
No to corporal punishment as pupils shall work and behave well because they want to learn in a motivational stimulated teacher /pupil relationships. Children show sense of responsibility if roled into different tasks needed for learning in their classroom ,including,distribution of materials,variety of apparatus readily available for pupils to use and study freely when they have spare time.