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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Pratham Books' One Day, One Story is back with story reading sessions for children across India! On September 8, Pratham Books Champions all over India will use one book to conduct reading sessions for children in their communities. All sessions are conducted free of cost, and focus on children from under-served communities. You can read more about this event here.

This year, Season 7 of One Day, One Story will feature A Cloud of Trash, written by Karanjeet Kaur, and illustrated by Bhavana Vyas Vipparthi. It’s a story about a little girl called Cheekoo, who has a cloud of trash hanging over her head. This makes her very, very unhappy, and as we follow her story, we learn a little more about trash, and about keeping our surroundings clean.

Last year, 5700+ Champions took the story of Kottavi Raja and his Sleepy Kingdom to thousands of children – conducting 6300+ storytelling sessions in 26 languages, in 25 states and 3 union territories in India. As well as 13 other countries.

We need your help to help children discover the joy of stories, and fall in love with reading. The more languages a story is translated in, the more it will travel to be read and enjoyed by children.

A Cloud of Trash, a reading level 2 story, is already available in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Konkani, Marathi, Bengali, Odia, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telugu, Maithili and also, in Surjapuri and International languages like Portuguese, Basa Sunda, French, Spanish, Bahasa Indonesia, Czech, Italian, Norwegian,and Chinese too. Join in as a Translation Volunteer to translate this story to a new language. Your contribution to add a language version of this story on StoryWeaver will go a long way in multiplying the number of PB Champs' reading sessions and in turn, help reach more and more kids. We have also created a level 1 version of this story for sessions with a younger audience. You can weave a translation of this version too if you like. 

Wouldn’t that be lovely?  

We need all the translations to be on the site before 30th August.

If you have any queries please write to us at [email protected]

Here's a quick and easy video tutorial on how to translate stories on StoryWeaver. Once you've seen it, you can head over to the site to start translating A Cloud of Trash.

P.s: If you're interested in joining us as a PB Champ this year, click here to enrol.

 

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StoryWeaver invites educators and resource people from organisations to attend a workshop to be held in Bengaluru on 6th and 11th September in Koramangala. Participants will gain an understanding of how to use StoryWeaver with the children they work with. This includes how to:

• Browse, read & curate a reading list from over 9000 stories across 118 languages

• Download stories for offline reading

• Create a new story or a set of flashcards from an image bank of over 11000 illustrations

• Re-Level / Re-Mix a story to suit your child's needs
• Translate stories to a language of your choice 

And best of all, ALL of this is absolutely FREE!

To celebrate language diversity, we are planning to conduct the workshop session in English on the 6th and in Kannada on the 11th.  You are requested to give your preference for the date/language while signing up. However, just in case we are not able to attract enough participation for the Kannada workshop, we will be looking at doing a bilingual one. Please do make a note of this.

The workshop would cover the following:-

• A demonstration of StoryWeaver and the platform's key functionalities
• Examples of how educators are using StoryWeaver effectively in their classrooms
• Dedicated work time for participants to try their hands on StoryWeaver
• An opportunity to meet other educators and have interesting conversations

Participants at a recent StoryWeaver workshop.

If this excites you, REGISTER HERE to book your place in the workshop, latest by 3rd September, Monday.  

Please note that the seats are limited and we might not be able to accommodate more than 2-3 people per organization.  Confirmed participants will get a separate email confirming their participation and other logistical details. 

The workshop will be held between 10 a.m to 4.30 p.m and there is no fee to attend the workshop.

Feel free to reach out with any questions to Khyati at [email protected].

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