Communities Rising runs after school programs for children attending government primary schools in underserved rural villages in the Villupuram District of Tamil Nadu. When they started their  new reading program, Betsy McCoy, founder and President of Communities Rising asked the students "How many of you ever read books for pleasure?" Not a single student said yes. Fast forward two years, and a totally different picture has emerged.

“All of our students are reading every day; story books, non-fiction books, biographies, all kinds of books. They are discovering the joy of reading! Without StoryWeaver, this remarkable change in our students’ reading habits would not have been possible.” shared Betsy.

Communities Rising was struggling to find beginner reader books in English and Tamil that the children would enjoy reading at affordable prices. Plus, they discovered that once their student’s were bitten by the reading bug, they could not keep up with their voracious appetite for books!

StoryWeaver’s relationship with Communities Rising started earlier this year, when they attended one of a workshop and demonstration in Bangalore.  Through StoryWeaver, Communities Rising has access to a wealth of books in both English and Tamil, which they can download quickly and print to share with children. StoryWeaver also provides them a choice of titles in a variety of genres, including books on STEM subjects. If a particular title is not available in Tamil, they can translate it to Tamil on the platform itself and have it ready for the children to be enjoyed.

“We especially love the bilingual books printed in both Tamil and English that allow our students to read in both languages on the same page. These books are a tremendous help with comprehension - it's like getting two books for the price of one!” said Betsy.

Communities Rising have downloaded all of the StoryWeavers titles in levels 1 and 2 in English, and levels 1-3 in Tamil. They are in the process of printing and distributing one set of all these titles to each of their 6 centres, thus reaching 360-400 students.

“We tried printing the books in two formats. One with single pages hole punched and attached with rings and the second with the pages stapled in the center. Durability is an issue and so we printed samples on heavy, card stock.” shared Betsy.

     

Creating Super Readers

The organisation believes that reading makes children learners for life and encourages reading in a big way in their after school programme. Each child is assigned a 'book box' which contains books that he/she must read each week - in both English and Tamil.  Children are incentivised to read through the SuperReader program which has been developed by Communities Rising.

“Each student has a CR reading necklace. They get a bead for each book that their teacher certifies they have actually read. After reading 10 books, they get ‘Readers Are Leaders’ pencils, and after 20 books, they get pins that proclaim them ‘CR Super Readers’. I'm happy to say that we are giving our many pencils.” said Betsy who believes that the necklaces, reading pencils and Super Reader pins help build a sense of community and sense of belonging to Communities Rising amongst the children.

 

                A CR Super Reader necklace.

At the end of the year, the top readers from each center will travel to Chennai to visit Tara Boks for a program there and the top reading center will have a book party!

“Last year, I told some of our kids, that I was looking forward to hearing complaints from their parents that they were spending too much time reading, instead of playing or helping at home. We aren’t quite there yet, but with the help of StoryWeaver, I have no doubt those complaints aren't far away.” said Betsy.

We look forward to hearing those complaints too!

You can follow Communities Rising on FaceBook. If you’re an organisation working with young children and feel that StoryWeaver could benefit them, please write to us at [email protected]. Do remember to add Freedom to Read in the subject line!

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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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International Mother Language Day is celebrated annually on 21 February to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity, and multilingualism. 

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The ability to read is the ability to learn, to explore, and to imagine. But without books to read, how will children become readers?

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