For our educator community, we’ve added a brand new feature called Lists. The objective was to create curated reading lists for our partners to help them find relevant content in an efficient manner.  You'll find reading lists for Read Aloud books, Primary Maths Skills and much, much more on StoryWeaver. Additionally, the Lists serve children of different reading levels, for eg we have a a Read Aloud List for young children and another one for older children! Here’s how Maegan Dobson Sippy, who helmed the project went about putting the lists together.

Getting started

Our Outreach team first put together a list of organisations who use StoryWeaver regularly for Maegan to interview. This ensured that the Lists would be grounded in the needs of educators.“ I went into the interviews with a set of talking points I devised with the Outreach Team.” recounts Maegan.

Maegan asked each of the organisations about their mission, and spent a considerable amount of time talking to them about the kinds of themes they worked with in their classroom/schools/centers and how often these themes were changed. She also asked them how they were currently using the StoryWeaver platform, and how they searched for stories and whether they found this an easy or difficult task. Organisations shared their own methodology for curating reading lists and if they had activities or lesson plans for certain stories. Teachers were also asked to share feedback on how StoryWeaver could improve the platform and if there were features they’d like to see on StoryWeaver that would be of particular use to them as educators.

“It was still important to  keep the discussions as organic and free-ranging as possible, as we found that was the best way to collect as much useful information as possible.” shares Maegan.

Putting the lists together

Before and while conducting the interviews with partners, Maegan read all (yes all!) the StoryWeaver/Pratham Books titles that were on the platform in English; plus a few community stories, which helped her create a matrix which summarised the books and categorised them by them theme/subject/reading level/vocabulary etc.

“It was pretty organic: I added new categories to my matrix as I started to get feedback from organisations about how they used books or wanted to search for them. For example, when I found out that lots of organisations like to use StoryWeaver for picture comprehension exercises, I added that as a category, and started thinking about whether books, or certain pages within books, would lend themselves to that, even if they weren’t necessarily wordless books.” says Maegan.

Similarly, when Maegan found out that many of the organisations were using StoryWeaver to teach English to older students, she started thinking about which books with simple language might hold the interest of older students. Based on what the organisations told her about how they used or wanted to use StoryWeaver books in their work, Maegan devised lists. Each list you see is based on needs articulated by the educators she spoke to.

“For me, this exercise demonstrated the importance of talking to end-users before attempting ‘solutions’ - a useful lesson for any kind of work! It was also a fantastic opportunity to read and reflect upon a large amount of content for children. Though the prolific rate at which StoryWeaver is adding fantastic new content means that my reading is already out of date!”

If you're an educator who has created their own curated reading lists of StoryWeaver titles we'd love to hear from you! Also, if you have any feedback or siggestions on Lists, do write to us at [email protected] 

About Maegan

Maegan Dobson Sippy is an editor and writer, who works with not-for-profit companies and publishers on a freelance basis. Recent collaborations include work for HarperCollins India, Duckbill Books, Pratham Books, Little Latitude, Quest Alliance and Humane Society International/India. Much of her free time is spent reading picture books, and uploading her favourites to the BAM! Books Instagram handle, which curates children’s stories with Indian themes. She has also written and Guest Edited books for Pratham Books. You can read her book 'Farida Plans a Feast' on StoryWeaver.

 

 

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Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Besides his academic work in Renaissance studies and textual scholarship, he has translated widely (chiefly from Bengali to English), and writes and campaigns on urban, educational and environmental issues. In the digital world, he has looked after many projects of electronic archiving and their dissemination, including the immense Tagore online variorum, ‘Bichitra’. 

I am excited by StoryWeaver’s ‘Freedom to Read’ campaign. India, young and old, wants to read but is so often unable to do so. So many of our countrymen never had the chance to learn to read: some children are still missing out on the opportunity today. If they do learn their letters, they often do not find the material to keep up their reading, and may even lose the skill. This robs them of their rights as citizens and humans, and depletes the nation’s human resources.

What I find so exhilarating about ‘Freedom to Read’ is that it is a genuinely free and broad-based campaign, trying to make reading material available to children in every possible way: through print, through electronic media, even in audio form where reading material is unfeasible. In particular, they have very astutely chosen to extend their presence on the Internet. The smartphone is the fastest-spreading piece of technology in India, and the most democratic. Over 50 per cent of Indians have mobile phones; an increasing proportion of them are smartphones, and if an adult in a family acquires one, sooner or later it will reach the children. Even more important is the attempt to spread the word – quite literally! – through group Internet sessions in schools and community centres. In a different direction, it is immensely heartening that StoryWeaver is also reaching out to non-scheduled, ‘minority’ languages whose speakers might number lakhs or millions.

I look forward to the day that the ‘Freedom to Read’ campaign, and others like it, will not only afford our children material to read as much as they want, but let them discover the joy of reading. Even the children of privileged families lose that joy by being made to read under compulsion at school. The story book – and that includes real-life stories and stories from nature – is perhaps the best ground where all the children of India can meet.

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We are thrilled to announce that Pratham Books has won the prestigious 2020 Library of Congress Literacy Award, recognizing our responsiveness to the unique needs faced by children during the current unprecedented times, and our efforts over the past few months to spread the joy of reading to children everywhere through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Literacy Awards, originated by David M. Rubenstein in 2013, honor organizations doing exemplary, innovative and replicable work. Collectively, all of these awards spotlight the great efforts underway to promote literacy and respond to the needs of our time. We are honoured to be one of five global winners this year, and the only organization from India to win the award.

As schools around the world closed indefinitely, and demand surged during the pandemic for digital learning resources, it became increasingly important to find new and innovative ways to keep children engaged and curious. Pratham Books created programs that could be used in low-resource environments, including launching the StoryWeaver Learn at Home programme in Hindi and English, adding to the repository of thematic reading lists and audio-visual books in multiple languages on StoryWeaver, and a phone-based dial-a-story programme called Missed Call Do, Kahaani Suno! that allowed a child to locate a story in a chosen language by dialing a toll-free number.

In addition, in just four months, translators on StoryWeaver translated 3,000 books into 28 new languages, including books about the coronavirus, health and hygiene and social and emotional issues. UNESCO and the World Bank have listed StoryWeaver as a resource for the homebound child during the pandemic.

We are grateful to our wonderful network for helping us share the joy of reading during these challenging times, and to the Library of Congress for this recognition.

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