Most of StoryWeaver's digital-first books explore STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) topics in interesting and fun ways. Some of you may remember some of our amazing STEM titles from last year: 'How Old is Muttajji?', 'Jadav and the Tree-Place', 'Up World, Down World', 'Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani!', etc. We’re happy to announce that these are also being printed early next year!

“This year, we’ve tried to create books that are simpler than last year, based on conversations with our outreach partners. Simpler does not mean easier, of course, and in many ways it has been more challenging. Fortunately, we’ve been working closely with some of the finest editors, writers, illustrators, art directors and translators who have helped us create a set of wonderful books. While the aim of each book is to inform and educate, the idea is also to nurture the innate sense of wonder in children and in turn, encourage them to explore further,” shares Yamini Vijayan, who anchors content creation for StoryWeaver. 

Exciting ideas through exciting partnerships

This year, we hope to widen the lens through which children look at the world around them, with stories that explore topics like space, types of houses, trash, seasonal food, subtraction, evolution, simple machines and even toilets! 

From author-illustrator Rajiv Eipe's book on simple machines

These books have been created in collaboration with 4 Guest Editors and 2 Art Directors. Award-winning author Roopa Pai has steered the books on math, Bijal Vachharajani – a journalist who writes on nature and the environment – has given shape and form to the books on environment, author-illustrator Vinayak Varma, former Editor and Art Director of Brainwave Magazine, has helped create fun science books and author-editor Payal Dhar has made technology and engineering appealing to young minds. With illustrations being such an integral aspect of these books, we were keen to involve experts in the field and so these books have been art-directed by talented illustrators Kaveri Gopalakrishnan and Vinayak Varma. We’re excited to say that some of the most promising authors and illustrators have contributed to the creation of these 20 titles. 

Priya Kuriyan brings Neema to life in vivid colours in 'What's Neema Eating Today?' by Bijal Vachharajani

In Math, we have books on subtraction, patterns of similarity and dissimilarity, division and estimation. Needless to say, all these have been explained through simple stories that show how we use math in our everyday lives and that it isn’t restricted to our textbooks alone. At Pratham Books, we have always realized how important it is to have conversations about the environment to children. This year, we have chosen to focus on trash, seasonal food, migration and earthquakes. Themes in science that we have decided to ‘storify’ are simple machines, virology, evolution and the lives of gharials. We’re certain that early readers will become more enthusiastic about science after reading these enchanting stories. You’d think that children’s stories on technology and engineering can get a bit boring. Well, you’ll change your mind when you read our stories on space, wheels, flying, types of houses and toilets. In addition to these STEM books, we have two moving stories on emotional intelligence, one on anger and the other on perseverance. 

Here's what we've digitally published so far:

Environment

What's Neema Eating Today? Neema loves to eat seasonally, and you will to now!

Science

Ammachi's Amazing Machines  How simple can simple machines be? Ammachi's here to teach you!

Apu's Giant Earthquake: what's causing those tremors?

Sniffles, in which a girl spreads her cold during a football match. 

Ghum-Ghum Gharial's Glorious Adventure, a young Gharial's adventure in the Ganga. 

Math

One by Two Share some biryani and gulab jamuns and learn a thing or two about fractions!

More or Less? Need to Guess! How many sweet boxes do the wedding guests need? Guestimation to the rescue!

I Spy! How many children are left at a birthday party? 

Same-same or different?, showing the friendship between a Sparrow and a Snake and also explaining the idea of sorting. 

Technology

Gul in Space: a girl explores outer space. 

In keeping with our commitment to creating good quality multilingual content for children, each of the 20 titles will be translated to Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Tamil. (Plus, don’t forget, on StoryWeaver you can translate the stories to a language YOU’RE fluent in and help us spread the joy of reading to even more children.) The development of these 100 books (20 titles in 5 languages) has been supported by Oracle.

 

To say that we’re excited about these new stories is an understatement! We cannot wait to share them with readers, young and old. Happy reading!

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At StoryWeaver, we believe that all children, everywhere, should have access to a never ending stream of stories in their mother tongue. If you are a language department head or professor at your University, then do consider signing up your class for our new translation campaign.

We are looking for student volunteers to help us translate stories to a language they are learning on StoryWeaver. Students can be assigned stories, which you, their professor reviewing their work before publishing. This can be an excellent project students can sign up to improve their language skills while contributing to a growing pool of openly licensed multilingual stories for children to practice and improve their reading skills.  

This model has been highly successful with some of our other partners like the Ugandan Christian University (UCU). As a part of the UCU Community Service Project: ‘Creative Writing, Translation and Publishing for Children’ in the Department of Languages and Literature, 50 stories have been translated to Ugandan languages to supplement early literacy initiatives.The project seeks to make mother tongue reading material  accessible to children of the local communities in Uganda through the UCU campuses and colleges.

StoryWeaver

StoryWeaver is India’s first open source, digital repository of multilingual children’s books from Pratham Books, a non-profit children’s book publisher. Pratham Books has a mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and was founded to address the lack of high quality, affordable, multilingual books in India. We realised that to even begin satisfying the reading needs of a multilingual country such as India, and create equitable access to books for all children we would need to massively scale the creation and distribution of multilingual content. The answer, we believed lay in technology and the power of open licensing.  

StoryWeaver offers educators, non-profits, language champions and book lovers across the world access to over 5000 stories in 100 languages. All these stories are free to read, download, print and share for free, as they are openly licensed under CC-BY 4.0, one of the most liberal Creative Commons licenses. StoryWeaver is accessed from a 350,000 plus (and growing!) strong community from over 180 countries around the world. Stories on the platform have collectively been read (both online and offline) 2 million times.

To sign up your department click here, and help us create more stories in more languages for more children.    

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