Pratham Books Champion : Padmaja Nagarur and Madhu Shukla

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.

Padmaja Nagarur and Madhu Shukla conducted two sessions - one at Roundtable School in the morning and Atta Galatta in the evening. Madhu wrote :

We had two very different kinds of sessions with two very different groups of children. The children found amazing ways to connect to the story which Padmaja and me very moved to see.

The following pictures are from the Atta Galatta event.

Picture Courtesy: PixMyWall Studios

Divya Purandar also attended the International Literacy Day event conducted by Padmaja Nagarur and Madhu Shukla and wrote about it on her blog.

Over the weekend, we went to a unique story time hosted by Pratham publications at Atta-Galatta, Koramangala, Bangalore. Usually a story hour is followed by a craft activity for kids, but this one had a theatre based activity both before and after the story time. Inspired by the book slated to be the centerpiece of the session, the story tellers, Padmaja Nagarur and Madhu Shukle had the audience, comprising of kids and their parents introduce themselves with an action that was to be reciprocated by the whole group. So Abhay did his signature “chamak challo” hand movement as he introduced himself. Soon were asked to play a one of kind game of “statue or freeze” so as to make different shapes with one’s body! Abhay found himself fully warmed up for the interactive story time that followed and was surprisingly an active participant at the session. He seemed to enjoy making different shapes with the satin tapes that the kids had been given as an after story-time activity. Hmmm!……I’m hoping it had nothing to do with our promise to buy his birthday gift later that day :-)

The storybook featured was “Susheela Kolams” by Sridala Swami and illustrated byPriya Kuriyan, a Level 1 Early Reader by Pratham publications. This is a story of Susheela who learn to draw rangolis, called Kolams in Tamil Nadu from her mother. On the auspicious festival of Pongal, she was allowed to make one Kolam all by herself when she discovered that she loved to draw Kolams. She drew them everywhere – on the outer walls of her house, on the sides of tall buildings, on trains and even on kites that people flew across the sky! Susheela became so famous for her kolams that the Indian Air Force Pilots asked her to help them make a kolam in the sky. Susheela was thrilled to explain how to dip, dive and turn their planes to make saffron-green-white kolams in the sky! Susheela gets inspired to take her kolams to another level, she tries to imagine kolams in between the twinkling stars in the night sky. A nice little book to tell your creative little one that truly sky is the limit!

Thank you Padmaja and Madhu for spreading the joy of reading! Thank you Divya for sharing your story about the event.

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.