“Open source is a philosophy and a movement, and what makes open source thrive is the community that grows up around it.” says Abby Kerns in The Newstack. Community has no physical or geographical definition but rather is defined by a shared attitude, interest and goal and spans  geography, religion and political affiliations. Stories are the soul of open-source platforms, which prompt children to rapid fluency in their mother tongue, before they can read simple sentences in English. 

Illustration by Huynh Thi Kim Lien for 'Don't Wake the Baby!' 

Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver and Room to Read are partnering to combine the power of open, community and stories so that children can read over 400 storybooks in English, Bengali, Chinyanja, Chitonga, Hindi, Khmer, Lao, Marathi, Nepali, Sepedi, Sinhala, SiSwati, Kiswahili, Tamil, and Vietnamese. “Room to Read and Pratham Books share a common commitment to providing underserved children with high quality storybooks. We are delighted to have Room to Read’s books on our digital platform, StoryWeaver,  which are now available under open licences, so that children everywhere can discover the joy of reading”, says Suzanne Singh, Chairperson Pratham Books.

Room to Read is a non-profit organization that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Founded on the belief that “world change starts with educated children," the organization focuses on working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments to develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children. 

They have partnered with StoryWeaver to publish 200 of their original language titles and their English versions on the StoryWeaver platform under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. The StoryWeaver team has worked closely with Room to Read on editing these titles for publishing in Engalish, doing image enhancements and migrating the books to the platform. Alisha Berger, Global Publisher at Room to Read says “We are thrilled to partner with Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver to bring our books into the digital space for the first time. We hope these 400 openly-licensed books will inspire, motivate, and share the joy of reading with the wide and engaged audience on Storyweaver, as well as showcase Room to Read’s 20-year commitment to making exciting and fun books for children in their local languages.” 

Having these storybooks under the CC BY license on StoryWeaver takes these Room to Read stories to a larger audience, worldwide. At the same time, it gives the StoryWeaver community new stories to read and translate, thereby giving children around the world access to more stories in their mother tongue. Many of these stories have already been versioned into other languages like Punjabi, Filipino, Malayalam, French, Italian and others. Here’s hoping the stories continue to grow so as to put a book in every child’s hand. 

If you would like to partner with us please write to [email protected] 

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Bhavana Vyas Vipparthi, has lived and studied in Bangalore all her life. Having finished a Fine Arts course at Srishti, School of Art Design And Technology, she went on to do a masters in animation film design at NID in Ahmadabad. Her mind is now consumed by her terribly talkative two and a half year old son, a perfect dog, and a fellow animator husband. She makes up a million stories a day to stay sane. You can find their work on https://vimeo.com/thestudiospaceman
 

When I was given the opportunity to work on a book for Pratham Books, the script that got my attention was the one on garbage. Chikoo, a little litterbug gets a dose of her own messy medicine, when all the trash she keeps carelessly throwing around, comes back as a big cloud of smelly garbage that hangs over her head. Managing our garbage through very doable means like segregation and composting, has always been a cause I support. And I was very happy to get a chance to do my bit for this important issue. The script by Karanjeet Kaur was quirky and unusual. As I read it, I imagined a mixed media/ collage approach would work really well with the theme.

I knew straight away that the garbage had to be real. It would add a great texture to the images along with being the only effective way to show the reality of our very serious trash problem. I collected our trash at home over a few days, arranged it and photographed the cloud that would haunt Chikoo.

 After the initial rough page layouts were done, I had a lot of fun exploring ways to show other elements. The flies that swarm around the cloud of trash were done with a dab of paint and fingerprints for their buzzing blurry wings. 

The odorous vapours were cut out of OHP sheets and painted, as the paint dried on the plastic surface it left interesting organic patterns. 

   

The backgrounds were done with watercolour and I used different kinds of leaves as stamps to make trees and bushes.

The ground and park railings were also created using different materials as stamps. 

 

With this abundance of different textures, the characters had to stand out on the page, and making them cutouts solved this problem effectively. The final characters were drawn on paper, cutout, and carefully painted. They were made in different parts with the hair, head, and body as separate pieces. Legs and hands were drawn on the computer later. We always draw from our own influences and the uniforms are the very same ones that I wore as a quiet little girl in primary school. 

All the different elements, backgrounds, desks, characters, flies, smell etc,were first photographed and then cleaned up on the computer. The final pages were assembled on Photoshop. Where most projects I work on start and end digitally, it was a welcome break to cut/paste/paint, explore and create something unique for this book.

You can read 'A Cloud of Trash' by Karanjeet Kaur and Bhavana Vipparthi by clicking on the image below

 

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StoryWeaver's Outreach Manager Payoshni Saraf shares what happened at a two day workshop in Chandrapur, Maharashtra.

In the warm month of May, a two-day workshop on StoryWeaver was jointly organized in Chandrapur, Maharshtra by UNICEF India, DIET- Chandrapur and Pratham Books with over 36 teacher from Government schools participating. The workshop sought to encourage the value of ‘reading for joy’ and introduced the teachers to StoryWeaver - an open source digital repository of multilingual stories.  Through the workshop the teachers and resource people were taken through the various ways in  which StoryWeaver could help address the language development requirements of the students and were guided to make them more confident about using technology to bring in more resources into their classrooms.

The session opened with a narration of ‘Bheema, the Sleepyhead’ and the participants were asked to guess how Bheema finally woke up. This set the context for the workshop with the participants agreeing that stories

a) are important in the classroom

b) make us think creatively and imaginatively, experience emotions and build curiosity

c) help children learn better.

As the session progressed into introducing StoryWeaver with a demo, participants shared their vision on how they would bring more stories into their classrooms. The second half of the day was reserved for a hands on session where the participants created content on StoryWeaver. This resulted in the creation of over 18 new stories by 16 first time authors, the addition of stories in two new tribal languages (Gondi and Banjari), 4 versions of a single story in less than 24 hours and curation of 25+reading lists that were useful for the participant group and the StoryWeaver community at large.

This teacher created and shared a story written in a dialect of Marathi spoken only in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra.

Day two revolved around the various ways in which StoryWeaver can be used in the classroom and how non-fiction concepts can be delivered through stories. The teachers were acquainted with the 200 books on STEM concepts on StoryWeaver, a unique offering of fun and knowledge and a module on its use in the classroom.  As part of the module, we read out Dum-Dum-a-Dum Biriyani to the group and asked the teachers to share their thoughts on the book. Along with noting that the book establishes the everyday use of multiplication and division in real life, many other interesting anecdotes were also shared.

One teacher pointed out how the story breaks gender stereotypes by showing Basha being the one interested in cooking rather than his sister, and how such mindset change can be brought about in young minds only through stories. Life skills like empathy, teamwork and responsibility emerged as other key take-aways from the story.

In later sessions participants came together to brainstorm on ideas to bring in more ‘reading’ and ‘books’ in their schools and classrooms. Some of these ideas included:

a) make ’15 minutes of daily reading’ compulsory

b) buy/raise funds for more books and establish and manage ‘leveled’ libraries and use StoryWeaver to supplement as an e-library

c) use stories for enhancing classroom resources

d) encourage creative thinking and writing  

d) Sharing of resources, reading lists and best practices among the teacher peer group through a WhatsApp group.

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teachers brainstormed in groups to create and share a 'reading' action plan

A feedback survey was done towards the end of the workshop to know from the teachers if the workshop was beneficial for them, gauge their comfort in using technology to find and create resources,  their vision for its use in the classrooms and their commitment on the listed next steps.  

Many teachers echoed the sentiment of ‘how different reading levels of stories is very helpful in a classroom setting as children are at different levels and will be able to read a story as per their reading ability. The presence of so many stories at one single platform will be able to fulfill all their reading needs.’

A retired teacher who now dedicates his time in setting up libraries remarked:

“I set up libraries in various schools and I am always looking for more books on different subjects. StoryWeaver is a great medium for my quest. So many stories on so many subjects, all for free! This is like Alibaba’s Khazana that we have all got!”

The two-day StoryWeaver workshop generated a wealth of ideas and established the foundation of ‘importance of reading and stories in the classroom’. We thank all the participating teachers, UNICEF and DIET-Chandrapur for making this workshop a precious experience for all of us.

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