Chennai: The novel idea of visualising songs in Tamil textbooks has became a hit with students attracting as many as 1.5 lakh views on YouTube in just over two months.
The album titled “Thaayanapaduvathu Tamil” contains 41 songs from the class 1 to 5 Tamil textbooks. “We uploaded the songs during the second week of August. Within two months, they attracted 1.5 lakh views,” an official from school education department said.
The school education department and State Council for Educational Research and Training have jointly produced the videos for the songs. The album was entirely created by government school students and teachers.
“We wanted to make the videos colourful to attract children. We have used manual instruments like thappu, thavil and nathaswaram, flute and violin for making these songs. The children sang these songs very beautifully,” said M. Amalan Jerome, creative head and director of the project. He currently works as a secondary grade teacher in the Panchayat Union Primary School, S. Kattuvalavu, Kolathur, Salem district.
Totally, 600 school students and 100 teachers participated in this project.
“We have captured videos of iconic places in the state such as Brahadeeswara temple in Thanjavur and Mamallapuram shore temple, Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal,” he said.
They also used real animals like elephants, roosters for shooting. “For a song about an elephant we used a real elephant for shooting. It eventually became second most liked song in the album with more than 10,000 views,” he said.
He further said “The students are finding it attractive as each song has a separate theme. Primary class students can memorise all the songs in the textbooks within a month.”
After the official release by Chief Minister Jayalalithaa in August, SCERT has distributed these CDs to all government primary and middle schools in the state.
“In future, we are planning to create video songs for 6, 7 and 8 classes. We are also planning to produce a video to teach the Tamil pronunciation,” an SCERT official said.
