September 8th holds a special place in our hearts. For starters, it’s International Literacy Day, a day that highlight the importance of literacy to individuals, communities and societies. September 8th also witnesses thousands of volunteers across the country read stories to children as part of Pratham Books’ One Day, One Story. And oh... it also happens to be StoryWeaver’s birthday!

(Image from 'Springloaded' published by BookDash. Written by Sam Wilson and Chenél Ferreira Illustrated by Thea Nicole de Klerk)

Today, we turn three! For such a young platform, we’ve taken some pretty big steps over the last three years. We’ve grown from 800 stories in 24 languages to over 9000 stories in 120 languages. We have a wonderful, collaborative community of users from over 190 countries reading, sharing, writing and translating stories on StoryWeaver and committed  partners working hand-in-hand with us to take the joy of reading to more children.

In the coming week, we’ll be celebrating three years of wonderful stories, three years of amazing on ground partners, three years of fabulous CC publishers, language champions and community members. We do hope you’ll tune in to read and watch how they’ve helped us take the joy of reading to more children across the world.

To each and everyone of you who have helped us take stories to places stories couldn’t go before: THANK YOU! Our achievements are really yours. Each and every thing you do on and with StoryWeaver, no matter how big or small, helps us move a little closer to realising the dream of ‘a book in every child’s hand.’

And lastly, to all the children out there: keep reading. We promise to always have something for you to read.
 

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Spotting books are a great way for children to engage with the book actively and for the reading experience to be an immersive one. It encourages them to explore the illustrations, and also make connections between words and images. We’ve been looking at a range of spotting books and it’s fascinating to see the different ways in which spotting has been made appealing to children. Here are a few books and illustrations that caught our attention!

How many animals and birds can you spot in this illustration by Vinayak Varma from 'Jadav and the Tree-Place'?

Scholastic has a range of spotting books ('I Spy' series). You can see their entire collection here.

Usborne has a collection of really amazing spotting books too: from bugs and butterflies, to adventures under the sea and in the night sky. In these, there are MANY things to spot. Here is an example.

Then there are the really clever ones, like Delphine Chedru’s ‘Spot It!: Find the Hidden Creatures’ and ‘The Odd One Out’ by Britta Teckentrup. In these, there are fewer things to spot but what makes it compelling is the imaginative manner in which the objects or creatures are hidden. It even works as pattern recognition.

Closer home, there are wonderful books by renowned author-illustrator Manjula Padmanabhan which have been published by Tulika. Take a peek at ‘I Am Different!’ and ‘We Are Different!’. Manjula Padmanabhan has also created wordless books for National Book Trust, which are bursting with interesting details because of which they also work as fantastic spotting books. Here's 'A Visit to the City Market' which was published by NBT in 1986.

One of our absolute favourite illustrations from Pratham Books titles' ('City of Stories') is this incredible illustration by the late Bindia Thapar. So much scope for spotting in this, right?

Hope this has inspired you and given you more amazing ideas for Spotathon! For more Spotathon details related to image size, how to submit your entries and the children we work with, click here.

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In January, 2015, Pratham Books sent out a big, bold ask into the universe! We asked illustrators to delight millions of children by creating a story in 6 frames and donating it for free under the CC-BY 4.0 license! The illustrations were then to become a part of an open-source, digital repository of magic! Stories and illustrations in languages from around the world, all openly-licensed and available for free.

Yup! You guessed it: StoryWeaver! But back then, it was just a twinkle in the eye of Pratham Books’ ambitious team!

We opened the challenge up to budding, aspirational and professional illustrators above the age of 16 and found 8 hugely talented illustrators (we called them 'Illustrator Gurus') who were more than happy to judge the best entries and also champion the cause by contributing a #6framestory. Winning entries were promised a pairing with published authors who would weave a story around their illustrations! (If you want to read more about the contest, click here.)

We shared a word cloud for the illustrators to use as themes and even wrote 6 simple narratives and shared them online for those illustrators who wanted a ready-made story. 

The response was overwhelming and in a sense, a true indication of the immense potential of community and collaboration! What had started as an experimental campaign soon blossomed into a carnival of art, birthing 450+ new illustrations. From watercolour and digital art, to simple black and white drawings, the entries were hugely diverse.

Archana Sreenivasan, Niloufer Wadia and Jithin Jacob were the three winners of the contest. You can read the stories created with their illustrations here, here and here. Some of these illustrations were used by Pratham Books to create delightful new stories (in English and Hindi) for early readers. 

While we're in the process of uploading all the #6frame artwork to StoryWeaver, we thought it would be wonderful to look back at some of the entries submitted for the contest and share them with our ever-growing community of children, authors, illustrators, translators, parents and educators!

Every Friday, we’ll be sharing an illustration from the #6FrameStoryChallenge. So look for #6FramesFriday on @PBStoryWeaver on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. 

Tell us which ones you love, create stories with them on StoryWeaver, or just lose yourself in their beauty! See you every Friday! We promise to make your weekend fun.

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