Improving Early Childhood Education in Uttar Pradesh - UP Universities
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There has been significant improvement in early childhood education in Uttar Pradesh. There are 1.8 lakh Anganwadi centres run by the Department of Women and Child Development. The Anganwadi centres (AWCs) will now be given the designation as ‘Blavatikas’ - Pre-primary grade.
The Anganwadi centres serve children aged between 3 - 6 years, infants, adolescent girls and pregnant women. Each centre has an Anganwadi worker (AWW) and a helper. These workers have 25 daily tasks to do like educating mothers during pregnancy, checking children’s health and nutrition, providing supplementary nutrition, caring for children during their first 1000 days and educating teenage girls about hygiene.
Role of AWWs
● The daily tasks of AWW include managing the centre, attending the events in the community like births and deaths and conducting health and vaccination drives. This gives AWW limited time to focus on early childhood education.
● The AWCs are equipped with a teacher guide (Pahel), teaching material and workbooks. The AWW has to do seven daily activities by making use of the material provided.
Calendar Nirdeshika
The Samagra Shiksha, UP has developed the ‘Calendar Nirdeshika’ which is a comprehensive guidebook for 52-week calendar for Anganwadi workers. It helps to make the instructional process easier and maps all the available teaching material to 52-week academic calendar.
The Nirdeshika serves as a useful tool for the Anganwadi workers as it provides them with the daily ECE-related activities. It has three sections with the first section providing the guidance, the second section outlining the approach and the third section listing the activities.
Section 1: This section provides guidance to the workers through three simple steps. These steps help the Anganwadi workers to organise herself at the beginning of the day and arrange all the material required. It also includes a plan to help the AWWs to link the information offered in ‘Pahel’ with the resources.
Section 2: This section outlines the weekly approach with the resources mapped to each of the activities. This helps the AWW decide on a pattern for reading, identify the resources and use them in their lessons.
Section 3: This section lists the poems and activities to be done in the 52-week calendar. It also provides an overview of the books provided to the AWW and students.
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