Edu-Cater, is a group of educators who are striving to create 'healthy learning environments'. They design interventions for facilitators who implement them in their respective learning environments. Each module/intervention typically spans 1-2 weeks. While their work encompasses many spaces, The Edu-Cater team strongly believes in the power of books and reading, which prompted them to start a project called Treasure Trove.

Treasure Trove sets up mini-libraries in schools or settings that have limited or no access to books. So far the team has helped set up 3 mini-libraries across Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Of the three, the team  engages closely in one of those settings as the other two spaces had all the resources except access to books, which Treasure Trove  helped them acquire.

“We work in a school called Sathya Sai school which is in semi-urban environment in North Chennai. Our target group is Class 5 children. Though this school does not have a proper library, there is tremendous support from their end to inculcate the habit of reading.”  shared Sriram Sampath, one of the founding members of Edu-Cater.  

Siram outlined what the team does via this intervention:

“In the first year of intervention (when kids are in class 5), we empower them with certain skills we deem to be most important like the ability to create, think and collaborate. In the second year of intervention (when kids move to class 6), we want them to feel confident enough to pick up books and read them.”

For both these interventions, Team Edu-Cater is using Pratham Books and StoryWeaver.

Introducing new words and books Treasure Trove shared the story  'The day the vegetables came to school' with children and using the story to introduce them to the words 'Author', 'Illustrator'  and 'Translator'.

“We gave all the children a small spiral notepad and encouraged them to maintain their own dictionary in it.” recounts Sriram. “The students carried  it with them everywhere to record new words that they come across and their meaning. During the course of sharing this story, students noted down many words that were new to them and asked us for the meanings.”

The team noted how children were excited to note down new words and curious about their meanings. “One of the boys had noted down a few words in his dictionary and had managed to locate the meanings of all the words except one during the course of the week.” remembers Sriram “The moment we entered the class at the next session, he headed straight to us and asked us for the meaning of the word!”

Children found many ways to use the notebook, with one doubling it up as a reference book. “He had drawn the parts of the brain in it.  When we asked him why he did this, he told us that he wanted to  use the book as a quick reference for tough content!”

Create your own story “We divided the children into teams and showed them the wordless version of 'The Birthday Party'. We then asked each team to come up with their own stories based on the original. It was delightful to see them express their ideas, which was the primary objective of the exercise. But what moved us was when they referred to their dictionary and introduced the new words they had learnt in the stories they weaved. It was amazing!” recounts Sriram “One group of girls was determined to use the new words that they had learnt the previous week. They created their story and were identifying spots where they could insert these new words. This sort of student ownership and little moments are what we call impact.”

When Edu-Cater asked one representative from each team to come forward and share their team’s story, more than one person came forward from each group to read out their stories.

“Many teams had more than one member reading out the stories as a result, and they took turns to do this. It really is a sign of their enthusiasm and confidence, to read!” feels Sriram.

The Treasure Trove project caters to around 85 children currently and there are plans to re-engage with last year's batch, making the total number of children impacted 170.

You can see more images from Edu-Cater sessions here: https://www.facebook.com/facilitatingisfun/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1489288461383170

The team’s future plans for class 6 include the purchase of a Library In A Classroom. “With this in the repository, we are confident that we can get the class 6 kids to pick up books of their choice and start reading!”

Good Luck to Sriram and his team! We look forward to reading more about them and their work!

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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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Roberto Marcolin is a High School teacher near Milan, Italy. He’s been doing some very interesting things with StoryWeaver both inside the classroom and out! Read on to find out more.

“I’m a teacher in a high school near Milan, Italy and I'm in charge of the school library. Our school recently participated in Libriamoci a Ministry of Education project to promote reading aloud. Many different classes in the school took part, with some students reading out loud stories from StoryWeaver in English. At the end of January, we took part in Piazze Solidali (Solidarity Squares), an event held in the public library of our city. At the event some of my students read StoryWeaver stories in six different languages: Albanian, Romanian, Arabic, Spanish, French and of course Italian."

A class from Roberto's school is participating in Etwinning a European project,  students from the Czech Republic, Spain and Sweden. "Through this project they will translate books from English to their mother tongue on StoryWeaver.  You can find the first seven stories translated to Italian on StoryWeaver." 

Students read aloud stories from StoryWeaver at the Libriamoci event held in October, 2017. 

Roberto has also made an audio version of ‘Ghum Ghum Gharial’s Glorious Adventure’ in Italian with Canoprof an open source software created by the French education ministry.

“Framapad is an open source software for collaborative writing which I used when preparing for the Piazza solidale event. I made some recordings of stories like this one and I hope to do others. I think they could be used to promote reading amongst students.”

Roberto has a few other ideas on how he would like to use StoryWeaver. “In 2018,  I would like to organize a collaborative translation of some stories of StoryWeaver involving other teachers and students. The translators could meet in a place at school like the library and collaboratively translate some stories together. I would also like to create free digital libraries using StoryWeaver stories as my French colleague Cyrille Largillier has already done here.”

We look forward to hearing more from Roberto and his students this year!

If you are using stories in your classroom or library and would like to share it with our community, write to us at [email protected] and we’ll feature you on our blog!

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