Spotathon 2016 has come to an end and we have been overwhelmed and touched by the amazing response the campaign received from the illustrator community.

The idea for Spotathon came from what we saw as a need for affordable spotting book for children. Spotting books are a wonderful way to engage children (small ones, big ones, and yes… very big ones!), can help develop pre-reading skills in the smallest bookworms and most importantly they’re just SO MUCH FUN!

So we asked illustrators to share one spotting illustration and answer key and upload it to StoryWeaver and create a mini spotting book with their entry. We also hoped that the campaign would familiarise illustrators with how they can share their work on StoryWeaver through the very easy Image Uploader. 

From deep underground to outer space!

Illustrators looked far and wide for inspiration for their Spotathon illustrations. From outer space shenanigans to life underground, we saw an amazing variety of themes emerge that are sure to delight children and keep them busy spotting.

 Zainab Tambawalla's 'The Crazy Circus' 

 

  Kabini Amin's 'Forest Friend's Party'

 Kavita Singh Kale's 'Nainital, a Wonderful Hill Station in India' 

 

We were overjoyed to see  illustrators we’ve worked with in the past, like Rajiv Eipe, Soumya Menon, Niloufer Wadia, Greystroke and Samidha Gunjal take part. And equally delighted to see new artists join in the spotting fun too! 

We'd like to share two small stories, that are a testament to the power of open source and joyful reading!

Cyrille L'Argillier, a community member has translated a number of Spotathon entries to French showing how open licences can really give content wings and help stories take flight. We hope to see many more translations of the Spotathon mini activity books in the days to come, so that more children can enjoy them in languages of their choice.

We received a lovely email from Annapoorni Trichur, a teacher with E-VidyaLoka and Udaan in Hyderabad. She shared Megha Vishwanath's "An Evening in the Spice market" with her students. Here's what she had to say: "They were so engrossed looking for things in the picture they didn't even realise they were learning!"

In the next few weeks, we'll be working on putting together an e-book with the best entries from Spotathon. This will be published on StoryWeaver. But do remember that each entry to Spotathon can be enjoyed on its own, as a mini-book.

We hope you enjoy the spotting books that have emerged from this lovely campaign. If you’re an illustrator, remember that you can upload your work to StoryWeaver with great ease. Your doodles, black and white sketches, line drawings… do consider sharing them with the world under the CC-BY4.0 license on StoryWeaver.

We’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, feedback to share on Spotathon then write to us at [email protected]

 

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Joeanna Rebello writes about how free libraries are making readers of children in small towns and villages for The Times of India. She also mentions StoryWeaver and our Freedom to Read campaign, and highlights the work being done by our outreach partner the Agastya International Foundation and community member Tenzin Dhargyal. 

"For Subramanya Shastri, project manager at Agastya International Foundation which has established libraries in 70 villages in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the goal is to get children to first read and write fluently in their mother tongue before progressing to other languages. "Each library has 150 to 200 books for grades three to ten, in three to four languages based on the local demographic," says Shastri. Unfortunately, books written in regional languages are limited, and translations (from dominant languages) are few he observes.

It's a problem that seems to have found one solution at least. Last September on World Literacy Day, Pratham Books, the not-for-profit children's publisher, launched an open-source online platform making available 800 stories in 24 languages, including 20 STEM titles.

The platform, Story Weaver, provides tools to enable readers to translate stories in different languages and scripts, and even rewrite available stories for higher or lower reading levels. It now has over 2,000 stories in 51 languages including Tibetan, Sanskrit, Banjara and Gondi. Their most recent campaign, Freedom to Read, launched this World Literacy Day on September 8, Pratham Books pledges to add 15 new languages to the list.

A few months ago, Tenzin Dhargyal, an English teacher at the Tibetan Children's Village School in Suja, Himachal Pradesh, started translating Story Weaver's works in Tibetan. "Most of the books donated to us are in English," he says. To encourage reading in their mother tongue, and supplement the stock of 33 books he and his colleagues have translated on Story Weaver, Dhargyal plans to assign older school children with 'translation' homework."

You can read the rest of the article here.

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The Outreach team recently made a big leap towards reaching children in West Bengal and Odisha  through two workshops conducted in Kolkata and Bhubaneshwar.

First stop: Kolkata.

We prepped for the workshop, famous Kusum rolls in hand and Kolkata in turn rewarded us with a fantastic turnout. Around 60 participants joined us from 12+ organizations working with children across the education and social sector. People had traveled from Asansol, Purulia, Bardhaman,Chandipur and even Jamshedpur for the workshop! We were amazed by the level of engagement everyone brought to the table throughout the all-day session. One such organization which attended in large numbers was Vikramshila Education Resource Society which works on a range of projects from early childhood education to capacity building from Ladakh in the North to Andaman in the South. One of their team-members raised the point that in West Bengal, if you travel 20km in any direction, the dialect and vocabulary changes. This slipperiness of the language can make teaching and reading a real challenge.

“What happens when the vocabulary of the teacher is not understood by the students and vice versa though both are speaking slight variations of the same language? What happens when students don’t relate to the texts they are reading?”

These very pertinent questions were echoed by many of the organizations in attendance. Fortunately we also had with us an example of a possible solution in the form of two gentlemen from Suchana. Suchana is a 10 year old community group, which works in Birbhum district of West Bengal towards the education of pre-school to class 10 children from Santal and Kora adivasi communities. Their teacher-translators have used the ‘Translate’ functionality of StoryWeaver to great effect to develop supplementary reading materials in Kora and Santali. Currently, 27 Kora books and 19 Santali books, both in Bengali script are on StoryWeaver; all this made possible by the Creative Commons license we follow.

The ensuing discussion was another aspect of our workshops: to bring people doing such good work in different ways into the same space so that they can begin to talk to each other and find areas of synergy.

We jumped into speaking about how Pratham Books came into being and how StoryWeaver was designed to spread the power of stories to all children, particularly those with limited means to access quality books. We delved into our repository of free content from flashcards and spotting books for early readers to our STEM and Life-Skills based books. The books can be used in a variety of ways: getting children to relate things in their science class to real life, using illustrations as speaking or writing prompts, and so on.

We had with us storytellers, teachers, librarians, program managers and content heads. They all put their heads together to visualize how to adapt the LSRW (Listening - Speaking - Reading - Writing) framework and content on StoryWeaver to their programs. Kolkata being the city of adda, we got into a debate of course about what kind of content we can and cannot show our children.

After a demo of how to translate and create your own stories on the platform, the participants got to work. We ended with different groups showcasing stories they had created on the platform during their work-time and we bid adieu with a group picture.

On to Bhubaneshwar we went!

We were greeted by the green, clean city with wide roads and took advantage of the day to plan for the workshop and also to fill our stomachs with ‘dalma’!  The next morning at the workshop people began pouring in from diverse organizations like Patang and Nilachal Seva Pratisthan who work in rural areas on programs including literacy for children and employable skill-development training for young adults. A number of organizations working with tribal children and reading and literacy programs were also in attendance such as SELCO, American India Foundation and Bakul Foundation. All of us were gathered in the room with one mission - how do we get children of Odisha access to more books to read in languages they love and understand.

The main challenge that came up during discussion was once again finding adequate content and stories that represented experiences children could actually relate to, in languages that they felt comfortable with. This was where we introduced the audience to our Adi Kahani series- a set of 10 books based on the culture of tribal communities in Odisha, with stories developed and illustrated by local writers and illustrators and published in local tribal languages.

Participants curated and presented lists of stories based on themes they wanted to teach like using ‘Cube Cat Cone Cat’ to teach shapes and dimensions in Math. Some interesting directions were explored during the course of the workshop: Gram Tarang which is involved in skill training and also runs Tarang Vaani, an IVR radio was interested in recording some of our stories and airing them on radio to reach a wider audience! A team member from Sikshasandhan immediately expressed interest in collaborating to make this happen.

The most lively time came during an ice breaker post lunch: we had to learn how to make paper planes out of the resource challenges we’d previously penned down, fly them across the room and pick up a different plane to see if there was any overlap in challenges faced. After all the plane throwing and giggling was over, we settled down into work-time where participants aired the sentiment of common resource challenge and shared the stories they’d translated into Odia and some new creations as well.

With a last hurrah and a group picture, we said goodbye to Bhubaneshwar. It had been a long, productive week and we were ready to go home and catch some well-deserved rest.

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