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Thursday 20 June 2013

Pratham Books Champion : Arthi Anand-Navaneeth

For International Literacy Day (8th September), we had a dream - we wished that 100 people would volunteer to conduct storytelling sessions across the country. We ended up finding more than 250 champions to conduct storytelling sessions across the country. We will be sharing the stories of all our champions through our blog.

This story was posted on Arthi Anand-Navaneeth's blog.

Venue: Bangalore’s Ananda Vidyalaya 
Date: International Literacy Day, 8 September 2012, 3- 5 pm
Audience: Around 50 -60 kids and around 10-15 volunteers


Pratham Book's Reading Initiative
Story Teller: Your truly 
Activities In charge: Shruti- Artsy Craftsy Mom
Projector Sponsor: Rashmi
Snacks sponsor: Annapoorna, Indira Nagar
And of course Ananda Vidyalaya reps

After a bit of warm up with imaginary idlis and chutney and ahaas and ohos, I was their "Sister" telling them a story.

I began the formal session with what literacy and education meant. I had downloaded a couple of poems on what fun and friends books are. The kids fluently read one of the poems along with me. Since it was largely a Tamil crowd it was easy for me to communicate with the little ones as well.

Then the focus moved to the simple and evocative book Susheela’s Kolam .

Given the size of the group, we used a projector for the pdf version. So the kids got to see the pictures clearly and read some of the text with me. The story session was enlivened with questions on teachers and the armed forces, types of kolams and materials used and even maths questions( eg. how many dots in a 9 by 9 kolam)

After this book, we went on to read Laxman’s questions emphasizing the need for curiosity and a questioning spirit.

Post this we had activities, helped by the volunteers, lead by Shruti:
- the younger kids coloured rangoli prints
- the older ones did rangolis ( we dropped the competition idea, all kids were trying hard after all)
- there were also balloons for the kids to do kolams/ drawings on

A huge thanks to the volunteers and trust members who put the event on FB and turned up to help with coordination and art supplies ! Their enthu is contagious.

The snacks were generously sponsored by Annapoorna making it a complete event for the kids there.

There was also pre event coverage in TOI which excited us since Ananda Vidyalaya was mentioned in it.

The photos are courtesy Shruti( Artsy craftsy mom) who has been doing sessions for a few weekends now with this NGO. 

I gave the extra books the Pratham Books team had thoughtfully sent and some of my own, making a small start to a library for these deserving kids. 

And I also left with a very dear memory of a child calling out to shake hands with me, after I had said a general bye to all.

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Thank you Arthi for spreading the joy of reading!

View more pictures from the International Literacy Day Celebrations.

This blog contains stories sent in by all our champions. Browse through the blog for more stories. You can also go through the tags on the right side of the blog to find stories happening in your own city.

Note : If any of you want to be a Pratham Books Champion and join us on our journey of getting 'a book in every child's hand', write to us at web(at)prathambooks(dot)org.

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