The National Geographic's June issue is being widely shared on Social Media, thanks to its attention grabbing cover. 

                                                           

One of the most comprehensive studies on plastic polluttion estimates that 8 million tonnes of plastic went into the ocean in 2010. Oceans that are home to a stunning array of plant and animal life. These books remind us exactly who we share our planet with, and will hopefully help readers young and old think twice before reaching for a one time use plastic, that will mostly likely end up in someone elses home.

Dive! written and illustrated by Rajiv Eipe

Take a dive into the spectacular world of coral reefs, and catch a glimpse of some strange and beautiful sea creatures! Available in 14 languages, free to read, download and share.

Goby's Noisy Best Friend by Sheila Dhir and Anjora Noronha

We could all use a little help from our friends... even when you live in the ocean! Legless Goby and noisy Snap are best friends who live together in a burrow deep under the ocean. What happens when Goby gets tired of Snap’s loud claws?

Miss Bandicota Bengalensis Digs Up the Seashore by Aditi Ghosh and Sunaina Coelho

Miss Bandicota Bengalensis is an avid explorer. Every time she digs in a new direction she lands up in new and wondrous places! This time our unlikely explorer has surfaced near the sea. Enjoy a walk along the beach with her as she befriends a host of strange creatures.

Turtle Story by Karthik Shanker and Maya Ramaswamy

Under cover of darkness, baby olive ridley turtles hatch from sun-warmed eggs on remote beaches. One of them, the little hatchling who is the narrator of our story, is delighted to make it across the beach and into the ocean without losing her way or being captured by predators. This charming life story of an olive ridley turtle introduces readers to several interesting creatures along the way.

You can read, download and share ALL these stories thanks to open licensing. You can also translate them to a language you're fluent in and take the stories to more children in more languages. 

Tell us, what are you reading this week?

 

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On World Book Day, we are excited to launch Classics on StoryWeaver, a collection of beautifully re-illustrated storybooks for children to read and enjoy!

What are classics? 

A. Montgomery Johnston in his article ‘The Classics of Children's Literature’ describes classics as those books that have a high literary quality, great child appeal and have themes that are of universal interest. Most classics have stood the test of time and have therefore been read by several generations. 

Donna Norton in her book ‘Through the Eyes of a Child’, talks about the importance and the need of exposing children to good children's literature. She says it nurtures growth and development of personality and social skills, helps develop emotional intelligence, provides an opportunity to learn about various cultures and transmits important literature and themes from one generation to the next. In his 1970 Nobel Lecture in Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that literature can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another and thus becomes the living memory of the nation. 

Classics on StoryWeaver

Keeping all this in mind, we at StoryWeaver were looking for ways to bring some of these classics back to children who have perhaps not been introduced to them. Since all of the content on StoryWeaver is under the open Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, we looked for classics that were either out of copyright or in this open space. 

We were thrilled to find Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/), which was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. This is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks, which are digitized and diligently proofread by thousands of volunteers for enjoyment and education.  

While the stories on the Project Gutenberg platform were incredible, most of them had very few and very dated illustrations. Since StoryWeaver mostly hosts picture books for children, we decided to re-illustrate a few of these beautiful classics so that a new and younger generation would be able to read and enjoy them. 

We are also re-illustrating some children’s classics from the giants of Indian literature like Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand and Sukumar Ray and publishing them in their original language. But more about that later! 

Today, on World Book Day, we are proud to launch our Classics on StoryWeaver series with the following titles The Man in the Moon, Pussy Cat Mew, How the Whale Got his Throat, and The Rooster that Crowed Too Soon, beautifully illustrated by Sahil Shaikh, a Communication Design student from the DJ Academy of Design. 

An illustration from the storybook The Man in the Moon, written by L Frank Baum and illustrated by Sahil Shaikh

An illustration from the storybook How the Whale got his throat, written by Rudyard Kipling and illustrated by Sahil Shaikh

Do read the books on StoryWeaver and let us know what you think!  We hope you love these books as much as we do. 

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Leave your thoughts in the comments section below! You can also reach out to us through our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Yamini Vijayan, Content Manager, StoryWeaver writes about the recently concluded Weave-a-Story campaign and how the collaborative spirit of a community helped 8 stories find their way to 113 translations of which 89 were in Indian languages. 

For over a year before StoryWeaver was launched, our team was working on making existing Pratham Books' stories available on the platform. Pratham Books does have a fantastic collection of multilingual stories for early readers, and we were eager to make these easily accessible - digitally, and in a way that is super easy for our community to use, reuse and recycle. But all this was content that was already published (in print). Shouldn't a brand new platform like StoryWeaver also have brand new stories, we wondered.

And it was this, in a sense, that led us to the 'Weave-a-Story' campaign – a campaign rooted in ideas of inventiveness, diversity (in language) and collaboration. The campaign inspired 8 enchanting children's stories. For four of these  ('It's All the Cat's Fault', 'Ammu's Puppy', 'दीदी का रंग बिरंगा खज़ाना' and 'चुन्नु-मुन्नु का नहाना') we requested illustrators to create fresh artwork. Three of the stories ( 'The Day it Rained Fish' , 'The Story of Stories' and 'துப்பறியும் துரை') were woven around sets of illustrations created for #6FrameStoryChallenge, a campaign aimed at building a rich image bank for StoryWeaver. 'Mangoes for Moidooty'  was created by a community user, who had used existing Pratham Books illustrations to string together a rather charming story.

In fact, one of the things that got us really excited was that 'It's All the Cat's Fault' – the story that we launched with – was written by Anushka Ravishankar, a co-founder of Duckbill, one of the leading children's publishing houses in India. To us, her openness to contribute was a sign – of a sparkling future for an open-source story platform like ours (read more about the journey of Anushka's story here).

          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the creation of these 8 stories, we reached out to the growing community of users and friends of Pratham Books to support the campaign by translating these stories into AS MANY LANGUAGES AS POSSIBLE. And once again, our community jumped right in and gave us enough reason to be eternally optimistic. We're delighted to say that as part of the campaign, we added languages such as Mundari, Sadri, Konkani, Khmer, Portuguese, etc. Today, you can find stories in over 30 languages on StoryWeaver and while we're thrilled to bits, we continue to be eager to add more in the hope that children across the world will be able to read good stories in languages of their choice.

We closed the 'Weave-a-Story' campaign on February 21st which was International Mother Language Day and what we'd like to share with you more than just numbers and figures is this: our growing realization that collaboration is truly at the heart of the work we do and without this, it wouldn’t be possible for us to do what we set out to do (“a book in every child’s hand”). Besides, the journey has been far more memorable and colourful with folk like you for company. So while this campaign is ending, we're really seeing it as a beginning, for StoryWeaver's collaborative efforts. So you – yes, you! - it's you who can help us transport these stories to children, so do stay with us and together, let's build a world of young, multilingual readers.

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