In the last year Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver platform has scaled up its offering of joyful multilingual books for children. One of our content streams headed by Bijal Vachharajani is creating 50 brand new books every year. “It's a tall task, one as gigantic as Hagrid!” shared the Potterhead. “Conversations with Outreach partners told us that we needed more engaging level 1 picture books to take to the youngest children. We also wanted to find new writers to work with.”

The editorial team was wondering how they could reach out to new authors who could write Level 1 picture books that used sound and action, which are always popular with young readers and educators alike. That's when wedecided to reach out to the children's theatre community. After all, who better to collaborate with than professionals who have spent much of their career writing, directing and acting in plays for children?

The venue for the workshop was the wonderful Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai.

Pratham Books Editor Shinibali Mitra Saigal, one of the founders of Kahani Karnival, reached out to her extensive network of writers in theatre. She also stepped in to curate the workshop.

“I think it's important to spread the net when trying to catch new writing talent. By focusing our attention on people with a specialised set of skills, and then guide them to picture book creating, we can make books that use their skills. In this case, it was a strong connection to what children find exciting and a good sense of sound, action, dialogue and dynamic storytelling” said Shinibali who kept in mind diverse skill-sets and an ability to accept feedback and change when choosing particpants. Shinibali’s handpicked group included a perfect blend of people like Sananda, Timira and Preeti who had created plays and scripts in schools for years and who were also very well-versed with picture books.

Authors like Neha Singh and Chatura Rao (winner of the The Hindu Good Books Best Picture Books award 2018) and playwrights like Akshat Nigam who recently won the Hindu best playwright award along with a colleague. Much loved theatre group Gillo Gilehri was represented by Janit and Yashoda. Actor and theatre instructor Lovleen Misra who has a rich background in theatre and television brought her own unique flavour to sessions. Bilingual Shawn Lewis is a strong believer in the idea that sounds rule a script while Shivani Tibrewal who has been teaching children to create scripts and plays loves the idea of whimsy.

Author Chatura Rao was keen to attend the workshop as  “Workshops like this help a lot in peer-exchange of ideas.”

Over one-and-a-half days, in the leafy environs of Bhau Daji Lad Museum, a team comprising of Bijal, Shinibali and Assistant Editor Aparna Kapur deconstructed picture books for the participants of the workshop and played games to understand ideas of children's narrative. One of the activities asked the group to split into teams and prioritise what they felt was important in a picture book, using chits of paper that had pre-written statements like ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and ‘Picture books should not talk about death, depression and sex’. The teams then had to explain why they chose to order the statements as they had.

Participants talk about writing for children:

 

Masterclass

The workshop also had the privilege of hosting two amazing picture book creators: prolific author Natasha Sharma and illustrator Tanvi Bhat dropped in to talk to the participants about the finer nuances of writing and illustrating picture books.

“The idea to invite Natasha Sharma for the workshop was very clear. Natasha has written a bunch of books for children which elicit a great deal of excitement and joy. Having attending a number of her sessions, I have seen the queries and the laughter elicited by her books.” said Shinibali. “During her session Natasha took all the participants through the creation of a book. She shared her process and was honest about the things that have worked and have not. She also spoke about how she has evolved as a picture book writer over the years. She stressed on the importance of  brevity and cautioned writers against running away with words, and letting the illustrations do the talking. I think that was a very illuminating point for most first-time writers.”

As playwrights, the participants understood the writing process but many of them didn't know what happened to their story once they had written in. Tanvi’s session then looked at the same process of creating books for children but through the lens of an illustrator.

”While making picture books, writers and illustrators are co-creators, so getting an illustrator to talk to the participants was essential. In addition to explaining her own process, Tanvi went into the details of how an illustrator would approach a project in circumstances in which she's involved from the beginning versus one where she receives a complete manuscript, how an illustrator deals with detailed visual notes from the author versus none at all.” Aparna  shared.

Tanvi answered the writer’s questions on how involved writers could and should be during this part of book creation, how much of their characters' final look they could imagine, and how the text sometimes has to change  once the illustrations are done.

Writing time

Before the workshop began, all the participants were sent a list of themes and ideas to think of potential story ideas around. Post lunch on day 1, the writers shared their story ideas with the group and editors. Their homework for the evening was to take on board the feedback they’d received and write a first draft.

Lovleen Misra’s poetry had the group laughing and sighing in equal measure.

Day two started with each participant taking their first draft to an editor for a one-on-one feedback session. This soon morphed into a freewheeling discussion with small groups sitting under the trees that are spread across Bhau Daji Lad Museum’s courtyard.

Hello Kids!

Sure the writing was great, the coffee was good and the lunch was amazing - but the real highlight of the workshop was when the kids arrived! One hundred feisty, energy-filled kindergarteners from the Sai Baba Path School, Parel brightened up the afternoon with their presence. The kids were there to listen to the authors narrate their ideas which was the real litmus test for their work! Each author took on a group of students, and regaled them with songs, activities and of course, stories!

The workshop wound up with a quick recap of what would happen next, before we bid adieu to the writers, excited about the prospect of fresh stories arriving in our inboxes!

Aparna admitted that her initial apprehensions about the workshop had disappeared. “I was tentative about the workshop because it was the first time we were experimenting with such a format. But at the end of the two days, I was delighted! We'd met a group of people, both smart and humble. They were keen to learn a new skill, and understood what children enjoy, better than most people do.”

“We managed to bring together a bunch of whimsical, creative and slightly off-kilter people who love children and get them to create words\ideas that children will love.” said Shinibali.

We’ve been receiving scripts every day and are confident that we have some real winners on our hands.

Here's a quick look at what happened over the two day workshop.

 

 

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Outreach team member Khyati Datt writes about our recent workshops with Teach For India in Bangalore and Delhi.  

StoryWeaver has collaborated with many organisations in order to take stories to more and more children. One such organisation that works with children directly is Teach For India and we conducted a StoryWeaver workshop with the Teach for India fellows in Delhi and Bangalore. We invited fellows from the organisation to spend a few hours with us and brainstorm around ways that stories could be integrated with everyday teaching in the classrooms.

With the fellows coming straight from school, the workshops were shorter than our usual workshops but the fellows were actively engaging with us despite the long tiring day that they’d just had.

The session in Delhi began with a quick round of introductions where the fellows told us their role in the organisation. It was great to see that the participants worked in different verticals of the organisation - there were Program Managers, First year fellows, Content Advisors and TFI alums in the audience. After a brief introduction of Pratham Books and StoryWeaver, we dived into the demo of StoryWeaver and the functions available on the platform.

We discussed with them the various ways that different organisations were using the content on the platform to give the participants ideas on how to combine learning with fun! We also saw videos of teachers and organisations using StoryWeaver with their students and shared our thoughts on whether stories could help make classes more joyful.  The fellows then went on to their first task of the session - looking for interesting stories and plugging them in in a lesson plan. While some fellows decided to use the story for Reading Comprehension, others chose to use a STEM book to introduce the children to the concept.

After hearing the thoughts of the participants on what they’d seen so far, we asked them to do the most interesting task of the workshop - creating stories! The fellows saw this as an opportunity to create the kind of stories that they thought would work in their classrooms and added a fun element to their lessons. We received some great stories from the audience, with flying animals and dream schools!

We ended the session with a question - actionable ways through which stories could be used with children. While some fellows were excited to share their takeaways from the session with other fellows, the alums wanted to understand how stories could be used in their context.

We conducted the same workshop with the Teach For India Bangalore fellows. All the participants were in their first year of fellowship and were happy to share their experience in the classrooms  and discuss with us ideas on how they could use stories to make children learn in a joyful manner!

Both the workshops gave us an opportunity to interact with people who were working with children directly and we thank Teach For India Delhi and Teach For India Bangalore for arranging the same.

If you are interested in hosting a similar workshop for your organisation, drop us an email on [email protected]. 

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Our Outreach Manager, Payoshni Saraf reports back after three days of stories, storytelling and learning workshop with SCERT Delhi.

A common wisdom that all of us who work with children need to be reminded of is this - storytelling is the oldest form of teaching. Stories help shape beliefs, makes one curious, encourages exploration, makes one question and eager to know more – qualities every teacher hopes to build in her students. And teachers have always been storytellers. Sometimes they just need to be reminded of that.

Pratham Books joined hands with Pratham and SCERT, Delhi to bring teachers together and help them discover the storyteller within them to make classroom teaching more interactive. We conducted an extensive three-day training with teachers on specific subjects for each day - the idea was to delve deeper into the academic challenges they face in the classroom and how some of these challenges can be met by using stories, flashcards or other visual cues to make for engaging classrooms.

We began the training on a sunny Tuesday in April with a group of enthusiastic and experienced mentor-teachers. The mentor-teacher program by the Delhi Government is an effective one, where certain teachers are handpicked after a rigorous selection process as ‘mentors’ for other teachers. These teacher-mentors each handle about five schools and support the teachers in the school with regular trainings, observations, feedback and sharing of good practices. When a new idea or teaching tip is introduced to the mentor-teachers, they pass on the knowledge to their group of mentees making the information flow seamless and effective. In total, about 175 mentor-teachers participated in the 3-day training conducted across the following three broad curriculum categories: 

1. Languages (English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and other mother tongue and academic languages

2. STEM concepts (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)

3. Environmental and Social Studies

The session started with all the participants and the Pratham Books team introducing themselves. The introductions had a twist, where the teachers were encouraged to also talk about all the languages they know. The idea was to establish the premise for multiple languages in the classroom and the many choices and challenges children face while learning, thanks to the language gap between what they speak at home and what they learn in school. Post introductions, teachers were grouped together and asked to come up with academic challenges that they often face in class. Some of the challengess which repeatedly came up included:

• Most students are first generation learners of languages (especially English) and language understanding is essential for other subject learning.

• Teachers want  creative ideas to arouse student interest in class but face lack of quality creative resources.

• Making connections between the language spoken at home and medium of instruction is important

• Additional resources (like cue cards/ flash cards) are required to help learn languages, especially because of the diverse learning levels in classrooms.

• Not enough time is spent in class building concepts or relating concepts to real life situations and practicing learning by doing.

• Language barriers impede understanding concepts, especially in the case of spiralled learning where one concept builds on another. 

• Learning environment in the classroom is not joyful as not enough visualisation or experiential learning takes place.

• Teaching children to develop a genuine love and interest for writing is a struggle.

With the challenges tabled to be tackled in the later half of the day, the session moved on to why stories are important and how teachers can use StoryWeaver, a digital repository of multilingual content for children, in a meaningful manner to not only curate the content but also to create and adapt  stories, flashcards and illustrations as per their specific classroom needs.  A demonstration of the platform was given to all the participants and they were exposed to the diverse content that is hosted on StoryWeaver. The group also discussed ideas on how stories can be used in a classroom setting to assist learning and real-life examples from across the country were shared with the mentor teachers.

       

Post lunch, the session was handed over to our expert trainer, Subir Shukla. Subir is a former educational quality advisor to MHRD, Government of India. He developed the quality framework for the implementation of the Right To Education and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, India's EFA programme. Subir is now the principal coordinator for Group Ignus, which comprises of IgnusERG (consulting company), Ignus-PAHAL (non-profit) and Ignus-OUTREACH (low cost educational publishing). Subir joined us in training and spent a considerable amount of time with the mentor teachers to take them through some useful ideas on making classrooms more joyful and learning interesting and interactive.

Armed with Subir’s tips and knowledge of StoryWeaver, the participating mentor teachers spent the last part of the day curating content for their subjects and classrooms. Few groups also created some new stories and presented them.

The workshop ended with many enthusiastic mentor- teachers sharing about how they plan to take stories and StoryWeaver to the schools and teachers they work with. 

Click here to see more photographs of the day.

We are thankful to all the participating mentor-teachers who attended the training and their resolve to bring back stories into children’s academic lives. We are also grateful to Mr.Shailendra Sharma from Pratham and the Delhi SCERT for giving us this opportunity. A big shout out to Mr.Subir Shukla for the wonderful guidance he extended to all the participants.  We will continue to engage with more teachers and Government schools to take many more stories to India’s children.

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