Heavy school backpack is a serious threat to the health and well-being of the students. It has a severe, adverse physical effect on the growing children which can cause damage to their vertebral column and knees. It also causes anxiety in them. Moreover, in the schools which are functioning in multistoried buildings, the children have to climb the steps with heavy School backpack, which further aggravates the problem and health consequences. This heavy load is caused by the fact that the children bring textbooks, guides, homework notebooks, rough work notebooks etc., to the classroom every day. Therefore, clear guidelines of what to bring to the schools is required. The load of a school backpack, as estimated in some of the weighs about 6 to 12kgs at primary level and 12 to 17 kgs at High School level.
Below Are Guidelines To Reduce Heavy School Backpack
Schools should focus on making the children understand concepts rather than just memorizing the concepts. Freedom should be given to the children to read, comprehend and express for themselves.
Schools should avoid repeated copying from the text books/guide books and participation in Games, sports, Art & Culture and other creative, co-curricular activities for holistic development of the children must be encouraged.
Feedback on the assessment and the performance of children is a must to improve the performance of the students and also the teachers. The use of guides and guide type study material should be avoided and children should be made to think, imagine and construct their own answers.
Games and sports in the evenings must be encouraged rather than engaging the children again in tuitions and homework only. Recreation and physical activity is a must for a growing child and it is the right of the children.
Guidelines To Reduce primary School Kid’s Backpack
The weight of the school bag has been calculated as per the above guidelines and found that by including the textbooks and notebooks and the weight of the empty school backpack for classes 1 and 2 should not exceed 1.5kg and with regard to classes 3 and 5 it should be about 2 to 3 kg.
The schools should provide safe drinking water to avoid children getting drinking water bottles from their houses.
There shall not be any homework for primary grade children i.e, from classes 1 and 5. All the work pertaining to exercises given at the end of each unit/lesson in the text books, should be done during the school hours under the supervision of the teachers. Separate periods should be allocated for undertaking exercise part in the class itself after completion of the teaching of the particular unit/lesson. Enough time for this practice should be made available in the school time table itself.
