Dum Dum-a-Dum Biryani

Basha and Sainabi are in a panic. Ammi is ill, and Saira aunty has just announced that she is arriving for lunch - with 23 other people! Budding chef Basha thinks he can cook Ammi's Dum Biryani, but her recipe only makes enough for 4 people. Math wiz Sainabi jumps in to help, declaring that she knows how to turn a 4-person recipe to a 24-person recipe. Do the siblings succeed in serving up a truly Dum Dum-a-Dum biryani?

ACTIVITIES 

Ball Toss! 

Resources

 A ball

How to play

• Have the children stand around in a circle.

• Toss the ball to the next child, or any child if you want to make it mad.

• Say a food ingredient while tossing the ball (keep this open across languages, for eg: haldi will do).

• Every time the ball is tossed the child who catches it has to say the name of an ingredient.

• First child to repeat or blank is out.

Play till you get 3 winners.

Weave-A-Story

Resources

• Paper

• Pens

What to do

• Put up a picture or a first sentence as a writing prompt.

• Prompts: My pet kangaroo was hungry and all I had in the fridge was a pod of garlic….

• More Prompts: We, my sister and I, were making our first ‘all-by-ourselves’ cake for my mother’s birthday. What started out as a special day soon turned bizarre…to say the least…

• And more:  Remember the summer break when we managed to catch the ‘milk stealing thief’ of our colony.

• Divide the children into small groups and have them create the story from that prompt.

• Each child takes a turn writing one sentence to add to the story and passes it on to the next.

• Keep it going in the group until they have finished it (maybe helpful to have a length or a time limit so that the stories don’t go toooo out of control)

• When all the groups have finished, ask a volunteer to come up and read the story out!

This isn't a spoon! it's a...

Materials needed: A bunch of kitchen utensils (10): ladle/spoon, pressure cooker whistle, lid of a pan, fork, wooden spatula, lemon squeezer

What to do

• Divide the group into clusters of 5 kids each

• Hand over 2 utensils to each group.

• Give the teams 15 minutes of preparation time to devise a play and use the utensils as creative props; use them for creative purposes other than their regular use. Is it a ladle or a microphone?

• Other Teams and you act as judges and award points to each other.

Team with the highest points wins!

 

Be the first to comment.

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Today is a significant day: It is International Literacy Day, and 5 years since the launch of StoryWeaver. The pandemic has only deepened our resolve to help achieve United Nations’  Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, by giving children around the world access to high-quality multilingual reading materials, and strengthening the publishing ecosystem to enable this. 

September is also the 5th anniversary of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We are delighted to mark this shared milestone with a specially curated set of Book Lists, featuring storybooks that highlight concepts, values and principles related to the SDGs.

We hope that these Lists will be a useful resource for educators and look forward to them sparking meaningful conversations about subjects like equality, peace and climate action – and inspiring the next generation of readers and learners.

Thank you to all the wonderful people who make the StoryWeaver community such a rich and vibrant one: our young readers, committed educators, brilliant creators, talented translators, farsighted publisher partners, and encouraging donors. StoryWeaver now offers more than 24,000 open source storybooks in over 260 languages.

With your support we can make Literacy and Quality Education a reality for all children.

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Illustrations  credits:  
Shrujana Shridhar for बेटियाँ भी चाहें आज़ादी written by Kamla Bhasin, published by Pratham Books | Priya Kuriyan for सतरंगी लड़कियाँ written by Kamla Bhasin, published by Pratham Books | Archana Sreenivasan for P.S. What's up with the climate? written by Bijal Vachharajani, published by Pratham Books | Rajiv Eipe for The Novel Coronavirus: We Can Stay Safe,  written & illustrated by multiple creators, published by Pratham Books

comments (22)

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This Teachers’ Day, StoryWeaver  is pleased to announce the launch of a delightful set of audio stories for children, called Readalongs. Artfully narrated, and subtitled, these Readalongs bring stories alive in an engaging audio-visual form that will help children fall in love with reading.

StoryWeaver has always strived to collaborate with the educator community to find more, and increasingly better, ways to introduce children to the joy of reading. Our Readalongs are the latest addition to this offering and have been designed to be joyful experiences for the child, with enjoyable background music, and a ‘natural’ narrative voiced by professional artists. Parallelly, same language subtitling, or SLS, provides synchronised highlighted text that urges the child to “read along” with the narrator’s voice.

Suzanne Singh, Chairperson, Pratham Books, says, “Through StoryWeaver’s Readalong series of storybooks, we hope to introduce more children to the joy of reading and help them build their language acquisition skills through a combination of listening to the story and matching it to the supporting text.”

The Readalongs are aimed at the youngest of readers so a majority of the stories belong to Reading Levels 1 and 2, and are no more than 5 minutes long. Stories with repeat sounds and words, that are enjoyable to read aloud, as well as those with eye-catching illustrations, and a fair amount of dramatic flair were chosen.

                                                     

The Readalong series features English and Hindi stories for now, but will be expanded to include a wider range of languages once we gain user feedback on these.

Purvi Shah, Head of Digital Platforms, Pratham Books, adds, “StoryWeaver has consistently added features and tools born out of our interaction with educators and on-ground partners. The Offline Library, which allows access to the StoryWeaver experience even in the absence of internet coverage, is one such feature. Curated Lists, accompanied by classroom activities, is another. This Teachers’ Day, we’re happy to add a third -- Readalongs. Consider it our celebration of Teachers’ Day!”

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