Zeba Imtiaz is an Assistant Editor at Pratham Books. She writes about Betsy McCoy's recent visit to the Pratham Books office in Bangalore, where she spoke about Community Rising's reading programme and how they encourage reading in children.

We all need inspiration every now and then – especially during busy year ends, when targets are to be met, deadlines to be chased, reflections to be written.  

Thankfully, the Pratham Books team got a BIG dose of this inspiration thanks to Betsy McCoy. Betsy is the President of Communities Rising, a not-for-profit established in 2009 that has done some incredible work with children from the villages of Villupuram, Tamil Nadu. Communities Rising aims to spread the joy of reading to all children, through partnerships with school teachers, and by opening after school centres. They directly impact 2000 children, and train teachers to multiply their impact. Along with this, they run specially designed programmes and classes to help students bridge gaps in learning, bring art to children, and encourage social and emotional learning through sharing circles.

Betsy and her team recently visited us at our Bangalore office, armed with baskets of wonderful books and colourful buttons, to share their learnings, and show us what they’ve been up to.

 

They make the best of often-under-resourced situations with detailed plans and schedules. The Communities Rising team uses a variety of methods and techniques to help early readers gain confidence and find excitement in learning to read. Some of these include -

• Always providing the children with choices in their reading material, to encourage the growth of independence and personal taste.

• Regular listening to reading and reading to self and others, to increase confidence and interest in reading.

• Regularly playing games with the children like letter bingo and scavenger hunts so that the children can have fun while they learn.

They also shared with us their experiences from working with Pratham Books. Bilingual level 1 books are greatly enjoyed by children, as are our colourful illustrations. They mentioned that they would love to explore more level 1 and 2 books as well.

It was a session filled with learnings – especially around the value of choice in books for children and the many little things one can do to instil a reading culture in a classroom. Our team also gained a lot of perspectives on what books are most liked by children and why and it definitely will enrich and impact our process of creating picture books.

Thank you Betsy for the great morning of discussion around children’s books.

 

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Pratham Books is conducting a workshop in Delhi to get educators and librarians familiar with StoryWeaver. The session will include a demo of the platform and also have dedicated work time for participants to try their hands on StoryWeaver.

If you are :

• a librarian looking to curate stories
• a teacher in search of interesting ways to introduce concepts to your students
• a Reading Champion
• someone passionate about children's storybooks in Indian languages     

... please sign up!

Please note: Registration is compulsory and we have a few seats left, so hurry up and register here. Confirmed participants for the workshop will receive a confirmation email from us by 2.00 p.m Tuesday, 17th May. Preference will be given to participants working in underserved communities.

Workshop details

Date: 18th May, Wednesday

Time : 9.30 a.m to 2.00 p.m (lunch will be arranged)

Venue: Preet Vihar, Delhi. More details will be emailed to shortlisted participants

Registration link : http://goo.gl/forms/5cN7qNhrXD

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On World Book Day, we are excited to launch Classics on StoryWeaver, a collection of beautifully re-illustrated storybooks for children to read and enjoy!

What are classics? 

A. Montgomery Johnston in his article ‘The Classics of Children's Literature’ describes classics as those books that have a high literary quality, great child appeal and have themes that are of universal interest. Most classics have stood the test of time and have therefore been read by several generations. 

Donna Norton in her book ‘Through the Eyes of a Child’, talks about the importance and the need of exposing children to good children's literature. She says it nurtures growth and development of personality and social skills, helps develop emotional intelligence, provides an opportunity to learn about various cultures and transmits important literature and themes from one generation to the next. In his 1970 Nobel Lecture in Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that literature can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another and thus becomes the living memory of the nation. 

Classics on StoryWeaver

Keeping all this in mind, we at StoryWeaver were looking for ways to bring some of these classics back to children who have perhaps not been introduced to them. Since all of the content on StoryWeaver is under the open Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, we looked for classics that were either out of copyright or in this open space. 

We were thrilled to find Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/), which was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. This is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks, which are digitized and diligently proofread by thousands of volunteers for enjoyment and education.  

While the stories on the Project Gutenberg platform were incredible, most of them had very few and very dated illustrations. Since StoryWeaver mostly hosts picture books for children, we decided to re-illustrate a few of these beautiful classics so that a new and younger generation would be able to read and enjoy them. 

We are also re-illustrating some children’s classics from the giants of Indian literature like Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand and Sukumar Ray and publishing them in their original language. But more about that later! 

Today, on World Book Day, we are proud to launch our Classics on StoryWeaver series with the following titles The Man in the Moon, Pussy Cat Mew, How the Whale Got his Throat, and The Rooster that Crowed Too Soon, beautifully illustrated by Sahil Shaikh, a Communication Design student from the DJ Academy of Design. 

An illustration from the storybook The Man in the Moon, written by L Frank Baum and illustrated by Sahil Shaikh

An illustration from the storybook How the Whale got his throat, written by Rudyard Kipling and illustrated by Sahil Shaikh

Do read the books on StoryWeaver and let us know what you think!  We hope you love these books as much as we do. 

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