TLMs;TEACHING AND LEARNING MATERIALS OR TEACHING AND LEARNING OF MISTAKES?

Teaching and Learning Materials (TLMs) have and continue to play a vital role in the Teaching and Learning Process (TLP) especially at the nursery, kindergarten and primary school levels of education.

These, especially the visual aids which include actual objects, models, flash cards, charts, maps and pictures make classrooms lively, clarify the subject under study and also enhance the vocabulary of pupils.

A type of visual aid that almost every nursery, kindergarten and primary school  can boast of is the illustration on school and classroom walls, most common of which are  the “A” is for Apple and the action verbs kind of illustrations.

However, the humorous but unfortunate side of TLMs is that some of them, instead of helping the pupils get a firm grasp of the Queen’s language rather corrupt the few correct phrases they have learnt,since they( the TLMs) are full of grammatical errors.

A classroom of a primary school in the Central Region (precise town and school withheld) in which i slept during a church conference in July last year had  the following  illustrations on the walls.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PICTURES CONTAIN GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTIONS THAT CAN BE HARMFUL TO YOUR ENGLISH LANGUAGE. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

A BERTHERFLY instead of  A BUTTERFLY

A SCHOOL UNIFORMS instead of SCHOOL UNIFORMS

THE CHILD HAS SLEEP instead of   THE CHILD IS ASLEEP 

A TRACTER instead of  A TRACTOR

The questions I asked myself after stealing these shots and I know you are probably asking yourself now are that; have the teachers seen these mistakes and if yes! what are they doing about them?

Since the school was on vacation and my role in the  the church event  did not give me enough time to probe, these questions remain unanswered. 

I will definitely pay a planned but surprise visit to the school to get the answers to these questions; whether the writings on the walls are still there or not.

But until then, if you need an illustrator, please do not hesitate to let me know, because this illustrator left his phone number on one of the classroom walls.

THE ILLUSTRATOR'S AUTOGRAPH AND CONTACT