Navnirmiti's maths kits add up to a new world for young children

"I love maths because it’s easy. You know, counting and doing sums," says six-year-old Ashna Mahajan with a conviction which would sway the most crusty math-phobe. "We get to play with beads," chips in classmate Krishan Chawla, more inclined to get to the heart of the matter. Bent over perforated foam boards, this lively class in Bandra’s Arya Vidya Mandir school is plugging the holes with beads to make the number "nine". Some groups come up with three neat rows of three beads. Others lay out lines of five and four. Another group comes up with two rows of four and a solitary bead. Unwittingly, they are figuring out the concept of addition: that different combinations of beads can add up to nine.

"The mathemat has brought maths alive for them. The kids learn by doing and discovering, not by rote," says class teacher Meeta Tongaonkar. More importantly, they don’t feel stressed. "Parents have been telling us their six-year-olds can add in their heads. And because concepts in the first grade are so clear, the children are even picking up second grade maths much faster," she says of the year-old programme.

The mathemat is just one of the tools in a maths kit brought out by Navnirmiti, an educational trust that aims to universalise primary school maths and make the subject more fun for kids. Also in the kit are bright cubes and blocks, digit cards, shapes cut out of foam, the Navrang cube puzzle and the JODO kit, with straws to build three dimensional figures. The kit can be used till the fifth grade and helps explain concepts as basic as place value to decimals and fractions and even algebra and geometry.

"Maths is the stumbling block for many children. Since it’s a language of science, those who don’t understand it are cut off from the other sciences too. We want to help every primary school child understand maths and approach it with confidence," says Vivek Monteiro, kit innovator and the person behind Navnirmiti. A theoretical physicist who quit the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) to become a full-time trade unionist in 1977, Monteiro’s experience in helping children with their homework in the slums where he lives brought home the need for innovation. The kit came out in ’98 after many years working with children and figuring out problem areas.

"Children pick up languages very easily but the alpha-numeric one in which maths is traditionally taught is alien to them. They are more attracted to the pictorial language. What we’ve done is come up with a systematic sequence of activities where kids learn concepts by making shapes, patterns. It’s the ‘language of things and doing’," says Monteiro. "Once the child masters the concept in ‘thing language’, he is better able to make the transition to alpha-numeric language." The teaching method’s importance was emphasised by a Delhi University study which found that 12-year-old newspaper vendors who had never been to school were better at common sense calculations than school kids who had been "taught" maths.

The kit works on the assumption that kids learn more by reasoning things for themselves, instead of having it dinned into their heads. "The best thing is they don’t realise they are learning. They think they are playing," says Tongaonkar. A team of activists coordinate Navnirmiti’s efforts and the kits are assembled by a women’s cooperative in a Mumbai slum. It’s currently used by four Arya Vidya Mandir schools in Mumbai, a handful of ashram shalas in Nasik and is being introduced in municipal schools in the Chandrapur and Yavatmal districts.

While some tools are patented, most are not. "We believe in borrowing and sharing. Originality isn’t as important as the objective —popularising maths," says Monteiro. Geeta Mahashabde, from the Pune-based Pratimaan, has contributed a great deal to ‘the kit’ as has feedback from the teachers. For more details, contact: Navnirmiti, ‘Discover It’, Near Powai Municipal School, Opp Powai Main Gate, Powai, Mumbai 400 076. Ph: 022-5792628; e-mail: navnirmiti@yahoo.com