Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Nature Teacher

We, at Saffron Tree love reading.

Well.... you all kind of knew it already I guess!

One big dichotomy we see in parents is whether to help their children focus on text books and home
work or to encourage them to read what in general is perceived as story books/leisure time reading.

This gap between curricular reading and extra curricular reading can be effectively bridged by smart book choices. Just like we did for CROCUS2010, we bring to you a teacher resource manual, based on our current theme - the five elements. In this guide we have incorporated a selection of books we have reviewed in the past few years to showcase how these books can supplement a classroom curriculum.

Target audience: Teachers and parents.

Theme: The five elements

What is included: A full year’s lesson planning guide based on the theme + book recommendations.

How to use the lesson planning guide


  • The pictorial representation of the lesson plan is provided. Click on the picture to view the clear, hi-resolution picture.
  • What is presented here is strictly a skeleton structure. This can be developed based on the interest of the teacher and the students.
  • The picture represents the topics and sub topics that can potentially be discussed under the broad topic THE FIVE ELEMENTS.
  • If you see a key word repeated in multiple places, it is not redundancy. It just means that the key word can be introduced again and again in multiple ways. Young children connect better when the same topic is multiple ways. Help them get to the depth of things rather than shallow, surface level knowledge.

How to use the book recommendation.
  • Book recommendation is available in Google docs. Click the picture below.


  • View as is or download the excel spread sheet.
  • The first column on the left has book titles. All the right columns are for the different tags/keywords associated with the title. Cross check the title with the tags to get a quick idea of the subject and age range.
  • Click on the book title to read the review from SaffronTree. 
Please use with due credits. Thanks.

10 comments:

Praba Ram said...

Fabulous stuff. Such an amazing amount of thinking and effort must have gone into this! I am sure people will keep coming back to it. Thanks, UTBT for taking up this humongous task for the benefit of teachers and curriculum designers! We must send it folks who work on such areas at the BOARD levels in India.

Sangitha said...

I love this. Shall be sharing with the teachers in my life. And my kids'. Thanks, UTBT. Very nice of you to do this level of work and put it up for us to use. Did I say I LOVE it?

Anonymous said...

Amazing...great work.We need people like you to bring change among our education system

Tharini said...

Awesome thinking tree UTBT! You've made it so much easier for us to pick up from this list to explore with our kids. And you have a wonderful handwriting! :)

Gayathri said...

thanks.amazing collection of book titles...

utbtkids said...

@All, thanks for the love people. Glad to be of help.

Meera Sriram said...

Wowza! Love the google docs! And I'm sure the teaching fraternity can take away so much from this!

Poppins said...

I'm loving this! I think this can be done with the books we already have at home.

Vibha said...

Very well thought out and executed. Great job :)

sandhya said...

Passing on the link to some school-teacher friends.

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