Pratham Books Champion : Sabbah Haji, Safiyyah Patel and Madhuri Vijay

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 Sabbah Haji.

Story telling at Haji Public School in the mountains of Doda, J&K; 9th September 2012
Our school has classes K-4 as of this year and we have 90 students enrolled. Two volunteers, Safiyyah Patel, a South African, and Madhuri Vijay, from Bangalore are currently with us and we were quite excited about reading 'Susheela's Kolams' to the kids. Madhuri taught the older kids about kolams the previous day, and they did a rangoli in the school corridor. All the kids were excited about coming over to school the next morning for the story reading.

Come the 9th morning, and there was such a rain deluge! Like, a crazy thunder-rain storm. Now, kids in our school come from as far as an hour away and it's all uphill and downhill on tough mountain slopes. And since we have 3 year olds to 12 yr olds mainly, we had a lot of absentees. Still, with about 50 kids in, sparkly faced and full of excitement, we began our little intro and reading. Safiyyah took over photography, Madhuri read out the story from a pdf printout you sent us, and I translated into Urdu/Kashmiri page by page while reading off my laptop. We went around the room showing the kids all the illustrations and they had questions and observations. Very interesting. Very mad. 

After the reading, we gave the kids drawing paper and Madhuri demo'ed a few simple kolams on the board for them. 

And the kids had a crazy happy hour long session of drawing and colouring.

And it was so much fun, and they used the book to get kolam designs and we all loved the colours and drawings on the pages.

In all we spent about 2+ hours on Susheela's Kolams. And a merry time was had by all.

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Thank you Sabbah, Safiyyah and Madhuri Vijay 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.