Sreedevi Gopakumar sent us this story about a storytelling session she conducted at St Joseph's Model Public School, Trichur.
I held my very first story telling session today at St Joseph's Model Public School. It is pouring non-stop in Trichur and The Red Raincoat seemed ideal. I read it out to four batches of about 20 UKG kids each and followed it up with a simple coloring activity.
The children absolutely loved it! They raced through their coloring pages so that they could hold the book, sniff the pages and exclaim at the pictures. These children are from entirely Malayalam speaking families and have no access to English books apart from their textbooks, so they were absolutely thrilled to have a sweet English story to flip through.
Every image evoked excited discussions in screeching, shrill voices. One boy pointed out that it poured in the last page, because that's when the frog finally got a chance to call out to the rain. In another session a little girl told me solemnly that it must have rained on Friday because peacocks knows these things better than we do.
The children learnt plenty of new words today (Cloud, Cloudy, Rainy, Sunny, Picnic, Thunder) and all of us had a blast. We followed up the story with a raincoat coloring activity.
**********
Thank you Sreedevi for spreading the joy of reading.
