Pratham Books Champion : Lavanya Karthik

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 sent to us by Lavanya Karthik. 

The session was a great success. I read at the Mumbai Mobile creche's centre at Chandivli, Mumbai. I landed up at 3pm, when the children had returned from school and had finished their lunch. I had expected about 35 kids, but a lot of families had relocated with changes in construction activity, so our group comprised just over ten kids. The group was quite small, just about ten kids but they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers as I had my daughter and her friend along as well, and they helped take pictures and made rangolis as well. The girls even performed some songs for me, and got me to stand in as Lord krishna since the boys were too busy drawing to participate :)

Apart from lots of rangoli powder, we'd taken along some perforated stencils, rollers and even an old tea strainer, all of which were put to terrific use during the rangoli session. I had made some flash cards with pictures from the book, and the kids liked them so much they each, they insisted I leave them behind. I left the book, stencils and even the strainer with the children . It was wonderful watching them at work - some drew outlinew with chalk that they filled up, others made impressions in mounds of colour with their hands and toes, some even started little experiments mixing up all the colours to see what they would get.

The teachers were very sporting about the mess - we manged to get rangoli powder all over the classroom floor!

We had a terrific time, and look forward to being Book Champions again !

Thank you Lavanya 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.