Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani

Basha and Sainabi are in a panic. Ammi is ill, and Saira aunty has just announced that she is arriving for lunch - with 23 other people! Budding chef Basha thinks he can cook Ammi's Dum Biryani, but her recipe only makes enough for 4 people. Math wiz Sainabi jumps in to help, declaring that she knows how to turn a 4-person recipe to a 24-person recipe. Do the siblings succeed in serving up a truly Dum Dum-a-Dum biryani?

ACTIVITIES 

Ball Toss! 

Resources

 A ball

How to play

• Have the children stand around in a circle.

• Toss the ball to the next child, or any child if you want to make it mad.

• Say a food ingredient while tossing the ball (keep this open across languages, for eg: haldi will do).

• Every time the ball is tossed the child who catches it has to say the name of an ingredient.

• First child to repeat or blank is out.

Play till you get 3 winners.

Weave-A-Story

Resources

• Paper

• Pens

What to do

• Put up a picture or a first sentence as a writing prompt.

• Prompts: My pet kangaroo was hungry and all I had in the fridge was a pod of garlic….

• More Prompts: We, my sister and I, were making our first ‘all-by-ourselves’ cake for my mother’s birthday. What started out as a special day soon turned bizarre…to say the least…

• And more:  Remember the summer break when we managed to catch the ‘milk stealing thief’ of our colony.

• Divide the children into small groups and have them create the story from that prompt.

• Each child takes a turn writing one sentence to add to the story and passes it on to the next.

• Keep it going in the group until they have finished it (maybe helpful to have a length or a time limit so that the stories don’t go toooo out of control)

• When all the groups have finished, ask a volunteer to come up and read the story out!

This isn't a spoon! it's a...

Materials needed: A bunch of kitchen utensils (10): ladle/spoon, pressure cooker whistle, lid of a pan, fork, wooden spatula, lemon squeezer

What to do

• Divide the group into clusters of 5 kids each

• Hand over 2 utensils to each group.

• Give the teams 15 minutes of preparation time to devise a play and use the utensils as creative props; use them for creative purposes other than their regular use. Is it a ladle or a microphone?

• Other Teams and you act as judges and award points to each other.

Team with the highest points wins!

 

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Roopa Pai is a computer engineer who always knew she was going to write for children. She is the author of Taranauts, India's first fantasy-adventure series for children in English,and several others, including some for Pratham Books. Her latest bestseller is 'The Gita For Children'. 

This is why I love my job. Every so often, a project comes along that holds out the tempting prospect of a never-before challenge. I take such projects on with (an admittedly nervous) alacrity, because a challenge helps to keeps things fresh - it forces one to shift gears, to look at things through someone else's eyes, to tap into hitherto unexplored veins of creativity. And  when it has been met to the best of one's ability, a challenge leaves one with a sense of accomplishment, of life having been enriched in some small way.

It was precisely such a challenge that Pratham Books' Storyweaver initiative dropped into my lap a few months ago. We want to create wonderful new stories, they said, and we want to create them quick. We want to hear new voices, on a myriad subjects. We want to help children discover disparate worlds - math, the environment, artificial intelligence, good values - through stories that are fun, engaging, and lushly illustrated. And we want to share them all, translated into a dozen different languages, with the world.

And once it is all online, they said, their eyes shining, anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to read them, for free! What's more, anyone, anywhere, can download them, print them, distribute them, translate them into any language in the world, use pictures from different books to weave new stories, or weave together different story threads to spin out brand new tales. Wasn't it all terribly exciting? And would I please be part of it?

It most certainly was, I said. And of course I would!

And that's how I landed my first job as editor. 'Guest editor', more correctly, with the responsibility of finding new children's writers, and generating, through them, four stories involving maths. The stories could be fiction or non-fiction, but they would have to deal with mathematical themes. As a sop to a first-time editor, they graciously allowed that I could write one of the stories myself.

I tossed ideas around in my head - what themes existed in primary-school level maths? Numbers, distances, patterns, measurements, arithmetic... What stories could be woven around them? The Storyweaver team and I went back and forth for weeks, until we came up with a list of ideas that we all agreed held promise. Then I went out to look for my crack team of debutante writers.

I didn't have to look far. Over the past couple of decades, I have had the pleasure of interacting and working with a number of talented, accomplished people who also work with children, but not necessarily as writers. When I had sliced and diced that contacts list to find people with backgrounds in science and / or math, AND people who lived in Bangalore (this for no other reason than that editorial meetings could then involve lots of laughing and chai-drinking), three names emerged. Fortunately for me, they all agreed instantly to be collaborators on an adventure that was new for all of us.

And who were these three people?

There was Gayathri Tirthapura, who trained as an engineer at REC (now NIT) Surathkal, before going off to the US for a double masters (Masters in Science from Stanford, Masters in Education from Harvard) and 10 years in the telecom industry. Since she returned a few years ago, Gayathri has run Kutoohala, a children's activity centre, library and bookstore where she puts all her theories on what makes for a fun, enriching education into practice.

There was Sukanya Sinha, a PhD in Physics from the University of Maryland, who has held research positions in several scientific institutes not just in India but elsewhere and is now a Visiting Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute. But Sukanya is also as much at home with demystifying complex scientific concepts to children - she is part of the founding team of Curiouscity, an organisation that promotes creativity in science among young people.

And there was Shonali Chandy Chinniah, a marine biologist from Cornell who has taught undergrad courses at both American and Indian universities, apart from conducting educational tours at the New Jersey Aquarium and working with NGOs in India to promote science education among the less privileged. Shonali is also part of the founding team of Curiouscity.

Over the course of the next few weeks, at several delightful and wonderfully stimulating editorial meetings (given the formidable - and creative - brainpower I was dealing with, it could not have been any other way), we picked different ideas, toyed with them, wondered if they would work better as fiction or non-fiction, and drank plenty of chai. Then everyone went off to write their stories.

  

The results of that most enriching experience is - or will soon be - up there on Storyweaver for all of you to enjoy. Already up are Sukanya's awe-inspiring  non-fiction story on distances - 'How Far is Far?', and Gayathri's heartwarming fiction story on math in cooking - 'Dum Dum-A-Dum Biryani'. Coming up soon are Shonali's enjoyable non-fiction story - The Fabulous Fibonaccis - on the endlessly fascinating number sequence called the Fibonacci (or Hemachandra) sequence, and my own fiction story based on history and arithmetic - How Old Is Muttajji?

How would I rate my editorial challenge on a scale of 1 to 10? I would go off the scale - it's all allowed in maths - and say 0. Because, like that old song goes, no matter how big the challenge, you can always get by with a little help from your friends.

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When Bijal Vachharajani is not reading Harry Potter, she can be found looking for tigers in the jungles of India. In her spare time, she works to fund the trips and books. She did this by working as the Editor at Time Out Bengaluru. After having studied climate change at the University for Peace, she now writes about education and sustainable development and is a consultant with Fairtrade Asia Pacific. She tweets at @bijal_v. 

When it comes to writings about nature and children, I often find myself returning to Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder. “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement,” wrote the biologist in her book. And it’s up to us, the Grown Ups to accompany children and encourage them to engage with nature. Which is why when Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver asked me to commission and edit a set of environment books for children, I was quite excited.

There was a long list of topics to choose from – should we commission picture books on climate change or food security, biodiversity or water conservation, the joy of being in a forest or seed sovereignty? The wonderful thing was that the good folks at Pratham Books were enthusiastic about all ideas.

Neha Sumitran, the web editor of National Geographic Traveller India, loves everything about food. And so it wasn’t a surprise when she decided to write 'Let’s Go Seed Collecting!', a picture book about these precious tree-babies. There isn’t any text bookish detail about cotyledons and endosperm. Rather, it’s a charming story about three best friends who love to collect seeds and learn about them from a wise old tamarind tree. Neha also offers a handy seed guide at the end of the book, which connects the dots between seeds and the foods we eat and drink. No more Match the Columns and Tiresome Tables, thank you very much. Archana Sreenivasan gave life to Tooka, Poi and Inji the protagonists of the book, painting them with affection and joy.

One of the most exciting things about the project is the translations. The Hindi and Tamil versions of Neha’s story have just been published, opening it to many, many more young readers. And there are more to come. As well as three more environmental books in the pipeline.

One of the stories is by artist and writer Vinayak Varma. His picture book 'Jadav and the Tree-Place' is about Jadav Mulai Payeng and his efforts to green Jorhat. Vinayak’s prose is exuberant – he makes you want to read the story out loud, with expressions, and imagine Mulai as he plants one tree after the other. No tedious memoir this one. 

Of course, there were challenges in the process. For example, how do you talk to really young readers about complex subjects such as climate change? It was a question I explored in my thesis topic when I was pursuing my masters in Environment Security and Peace with a specialisation in Climate Change and Security at the University for Peace. Artist Alison Byrnes used the metaphor of a mountain goat to talk about the complexities of over-consumption, migration, and resource scarcity in her story. How do you strike the balance when it comes to narrating bleak stories but offer that glimmer of hope? That was one of our biggest struggles, but I think Alison’s beautifully textured drawings manage to do just that.  

Content Manager Yamini Vijayan (who I call my partner in prose) and I learnt so much from Padmaparna Ghosh, as we edited her delightful story about the biodiversity of canopy forests 'Up World, Down World'. A girl and a dormouse become tentative friends as they take the reader on a whirlwind journey of the forest’s many denizens. Stories where children and animals intersect often become ethnocentric, and that was something that the three of us were aware of. We didn’t want children to always be the ones to swoop in and save the day or the idea of the forests being “of use” to humans. Instead, Padmaparna’s insightful narrative coupled with Sunaina Coelho’s stunning illustrations spotlight the lushness of the canopy forests.

These stories are all going to be picture books. And one of the compelling reasons for children, parents, and educators to tap to the next page is the images. Archana, Vinayak, Sunaina, and Alison have been working with the wonderful Kaveri Gopalakrishnan to infuse our carefully-written words with images. All of that comes together to hopefully make these stories enduring, compelling, and memorable, which foster that sense of wonder in children and maybe even for the Grown Ups.

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