We have a very vast campus blessed with trees and green foliage. Every attempt has been done by the management and other administrative boards to assure that every student finds St. Mary’s a very lively, fun and resourceful place to cherish their erudite years.
The need for safe passage of each child to school and back home is of paramount importance to us. To ensure safe travel the school has its own fleet of school buses designed as per standards and manned by trained drivers and personnel sensitized to the needs of small children. For supervision and monitoring a transport attendant is on board throughout the journey. Mobile phones have been provided in each bus that ensures efficiency in terms of service and better communication in case of emergencies. Besides ensuring the implementation of the safety norms, all staff on the bus is well trained in first aid and emergency management.
The Library has specialized collections of books & other resources in Mathematics, Science, Botany, Zoology, English, Social Science, Tamil, Commerce, Accountancy, Business Maths, Management, Economics, Primary stories, Kindergarten collections etc., ranging from printed books, e-books, and CDs/DVDs.
Effective teaching and learning of Science involves a perpetual state of show and tell. Our school combines classroom teaching with laboratory experiments to ensure that our students grasp each and every concept thoroughly. It is also believed that laboratory teaching and experiments that are being conducted here help encourage deep understanding in children. Children are able to retain the knowledge for longer when they see the experiments being performed in front of their eyes. The knowledge that kids attain in classrooms would be ineffectual unless they actually observe the process and understand the relationship between action and reaction.
Physics is an experimental science. The theoretical concepts and relationships introduced in the lecture part of the course describe the general nature and behaviour of real phenomena. Genuine understanding entails being able to relate the abstract ideas to the particular facts to which they correspond. The laboratory is not a contest whose object is to get the "right answer." The purpose is to learn how to gain knowledge by looking at reality, not an attempt to make reality conform to preconceptions. The important thing is to learn how to be observant, to really see what happens, and to deal with this information with the strictest integrity. And to understand, or learn to understand, the meaning of what happens.
Practical ability to do experiments and analyze data is usually acquired through practice and experience. Practice is very important in learning any new discipline; such as, for example, a new language. A good lecture may be very helpful but not fully useful without actual practice. In experimental science, practice involves solving many problems (i.e. homework) and performing a variety of experiments (i.e. labs). Practice is essential to being able to make the connection between theory and experience.
Chemistry is often perceived as complicated and even boring. At our school, learning chemistry is super fun! It is a place to explore, enjoy and also understand the responsibility of treating equipment and chemicals with the care and attention they deserve. Learning methods, facilities and the faculty here prove that the subject can be interesting and easy to learn.
Each of our science subjects has a separate laboratory. The chemistry lab is fully equipped to ensure that students are in touch with all the latest developments and techniques in this realm. The environment and setting of the lab nurture the intuitive and inquisitive minds of the children and enhance their zest to make scientific enquiries. The teachers and the highly trained lab staff provide an atmosphere conducive to learning not just in theory but by applying it practically.
The laboratory is well-structured, airy, spacious, well-lit and replete with all the required equipments and tools. The materials are in abundance to allow each child to freely explore the secrecies of living organisms and sort out theoretical difficulties through experimentation. In our attempt to provide a well-rounded scope of this subject, students are also taken on trips around the school and parks to better grasp the peculiarities of the flora and fauna. Our little ones, in the primary section, are especially thrilled each time they are taken for these educational trips. The school’s head-gardener supplies the biology laboratory with plants and insects for scrutiny. Students engage in lively and interesting experiments like grafting, germination process and chromatography in this lab. Dissection of plants and vegetables is received with much enthusiasm as students get to use microscopes and other equipment that they would not normally use to view the living world.
Technology plays a major role in twenty-first century education. The new model of integrating technology into the curriculum means that computers are on demand throughout the world. Well-designed and separate computer labs for kids and older children, run by a well-educated and qualified faculty, with one-on-one access, which means there is one computer for each child. Pre – primary kids learn words through PowerPoint presentations and innovative software. There are 60 computers in our labs currently. They are state-of-the-art with multimedia, most of them with 17″ LCD monitors that are easier on eyes, generate less heat and consume less power thereby keeping the classroom atmosphere comfortable for children. We use our own LAN with Windows XP for teaching-learning, documentation and presentations. Currently we can claim 1:10 as the ‘student to computer ratio’ on campus.
