Award winning teacher makes chemistry easy

Sangeeta Sohni, a Mumbai based teacher has recently been awarded the President's award for her experiment to teach chemistry to students in an easy and effective way.

Mumbai: If there is ease in teaching, then the student's study is done properly. For this, some teachers adopt different methods. Chemistry is considered, by many students, as one of the most difficult subjects in the curriculum after mathematics, geometry etc. But a new experiment has been developed by Mumbai-based teacher Sangeeta Sohni to overcome the fear of this subject and teach it to the students effectively. The teacher's experiment has received national acclaim and has recently been awarded the President's Award.

Chemistry, she said, is just a study of the mixture of different chemicals, various experiments that take place in it, the different types of odours that come out of it, the diffusion of it. While learning all this, the subject seems a bit complicated. But Sangeeta Sohni has made it very easy to teach this subject to the students through a variety of toys and objects. For this, they have used different coloured balls, colourful bangles, different coloured and different sized balloons, rings, handkerchiefs etc. In addition to this, she has further simplified the subject by inventing different types of chemicals in the laboratory and based on the periodic table. As a result, students are now fascinated with Chemistry.

Sohni has come up with an innovative teaching method to make it easy and simple for students to get information about elements, oxygen and different types of protons and electrons through the Periodic Table. She emphasized on how to make a difficult subject easier for the students through entertainment and fun. She said that the students' fear of the subject has gone forever with this.

"When I was a child studying chemistry, I used to have many kinds of problems, so I started doing different kinds of experiments to get rid of those problems." She made a "name game" for the students to memorize the names of the chemical elements and made the subject easy for the students based on the periodic table. From this table, students began remembering a variety of names. So they became strong in this subject. From time to time, I have shown how this periodic table can benefit not only chemistry but also science and engineering students. The concept of chemistry was explained to the students more effectively by using colourful balloons. She convinced the students how to do chemical boarding from the use of smile balls as well as bangles.

“I kept teaching students how to simplify various experiments in chemistry using toy tools,” she said. "Sometimes there is fear and sometimes there is curiosity about laboratory experiments. So to overcome this fear, I allayed their fears by experimenting in front of them and involving them in it."

"My work was noticed at the national level because of the simplification of chemistry and using various experiments and games for it. That is why I have recently received a national award from the President for his work in this field," Sohni said.

"In the field of science, there is a certain amount of fear that needs to be removed. That is why I have designed a game for it by designing various questions. I taught the students how to use different types of chemicals and how they can be used for a mixture of those chemicals by experimenting with the type of card, keeping in mind the topics of interest to the students," she said. "This has made a huge difference in the quality of the students and also created a fascination in this subject," she concluded.