Illustration And Teaching (3)

Illustration can help students to get a clearer picture of certain facts to be understood. Let me show you an example here. How are you going to impress upon the students the importance of the standardisation of units of measurement? I used to tell a story about the king of an imaginary kingdom. The king was so powerful that, every unit of measurement was based certain measurement of his body. Let's say the unit 'ela' is the distance between the nose of the king and the thumb of his outstretched hand. Every measurement of length in the kingdom was based on the unit 'ela' as defined above. One day the king passed away and the throne was passed to his son who was still a baby. The 'ela' was still defined the same way. It is not difficult to imagine that the kingdom suffered a bout of serious inflation, even though the price per 'ela' of goods remained unchanged.

After that story, it is not difficult to tell students how important it is that 1 metre is the same length irrespective of whether you are in Malaysia, USA or Africa.

Don't forget, when you tell a story, you start to connect with your students. When you use illustration while telling the story, you can connect even better. Just a reminder, in this case, the story and the illustration is just a switch-- once the students are switched on, you must move on with your science content. Do not be too engrossed with your story-telling and drawing and forget your main theme.