Pre-school course in Khowar introduced

The Mother Tongue Institute for Education and Research (MIER) Chitral has for the first time introduced a pre-school course aimed at improving the students’ basic skill of reading, writing, speaking and listening in their mother tongue. It has also published Khowar Nama, Khowar Calendar, documentation of fairly tales/mythologies and standardization of Khowar orthography. The pre-school course of MIER is designed to teach children in their own mother tongue (Khowar). Following the Multilingual Education (MLE) initiative to cover the weakness of a child in understanding the concepts, lack of creativity and decreasing the chances of drop-outs in schools, which MIER follows to alternates teaching a child in his/her own mother tongue relating it with authentic Since research supports under the MLE approach to learning that every child can learn better in their own mother tongue than any other language. It has also been legislated in KPK province that it is the right of every child to be taught in her/s mother tongue as well. MIER by following MLE guidelines has intended through this pilot project to implement a program of teaching children in their mother tongue in contextualizing learning materials with the context. It also wants to bring reformation in its recently prepared course in mother -tongue and bringing change in understanding and developing interest in children relating it with the seasons, festivals, customs and traditions still in vogue in most of the areas of Chitral. There are 8 themes in each part of Khowar course: composed of 16 short stories, 16 stories for listening, eight poems, alphabet book and Khowar Qaida for writing, reading, speaking and listening. This whole course will be divided in days and classes for a year on the basis of a time table prepared before its Short stories will be purposeful and interesting in terms of its construction as one story has been thought out to discuss the ‘advantages of raining’- covers the benefits of rain. At the end of the story, students will be asked to recapitulate what they have just studied about advantages of raining. It not only focuses in improving the skill of reading and listening of children but also to reproduce some useful Before introducing letters to students’ a practice is made with an objective for the identification of pictures or images. Starting writing practice in a book of images/pictures is to start how to colour or to hold and use a pen to write. Khowar alphabet book (Qaeda) is framed to introduce a child with letters. The arrangement of letters in this book is sequenced in a way with the increasing usage of particular letter (s) in a word in Khowar in a different way than the arrangement of letters in Urdu and English. A word or phrase is used and later a sentence is constructed to use the word repeatedly more for identification of a letter (symbol). This alphabet book is aimed to introduce new words to children as well as improving their writing skill with repeated usage of a number of letters according to an intended scheme of work. The teaching practice for this book starts in the identification of a letter (known as key letter) to a key word and vice-versa. Once a word does not express a targeted expression, to introduce another letter; another technique is used to introduce new letter and construction of word from, to expression the letter with another expression. This is a process of learning leads to a letter to another letter(s) within the parameters of intended objectives in a class.–To be concluded The writer is a Chitral-based teacher and free lance journalist.]]>