Thinking back
This blog is about the children of Std V of 2nd Lt. J. J. Rane Govt. High School, Kudchire, Bicholim. I first met this class of 20 children in my first year of work at Bookworm in 2016. I remember Ma’am Sujata telling me about this school. She was sure that I would like it and I was indeed happy to be in this school. After a gruelling one and half hour drive, it would bring me immense joy to see the children rush with excitement shouting ‘Bookworm, Bookworm’ and trying to touch the van.
This year, the class strength has increased to a total of 39 children as there are many new admissions. I noticed a change in the children this year as they were not much excited by our arrival anymore. They were more engrossed in the smart class screen in their class. I wondered about this change.
Starting afresh – My session reports were not happy reports as I had to invest in a lot of energy to get the children interested in books. Ma’am Sujata noticed this and was very keen on changing this and advised me to reflect on my storybook choices and suggested different books. I took the book ‘Rock A Doodle Do’ by Michael Foreman. This is a simple story with an element of drama and brilliant illustrations and I felt that this would bring some cheerfulness back into my sessions.
The children mentioned that they knew this story as it is a part of their academic text. This shot down all my hopes at first, but then I remembered our Mobile Outreach Program sessions where children of different age groups, participate in our sessions, year after year. These children are often familiar with the stories that we read aloud, but we encourage them to observe the illustrations of familiar stories with great detail. I used this tactic with this class and asked them to be alert and observe the illustrations as I would be asking them questions.
I was surprised to see the children so engrossed in the illustrations and the story during the Read Aloud, and responding with enthusiasm and mimicking the animal characters from the story. The children shared that they knew the story but did not have such good illustrations in their text book. This sharing lifted my spirits and I was hopeful again about encouraging the children.
Moving ahead – The following session had me taking another animal story ‘Rooster Raga’ by Natasha Sharma and illustrations by Priya Kuriyan. The children loved the song and we sang the Rooster song with actions. We moved our heads, stamped our feet and the boys gave a beat to the song by drumming on the benches. The entire school heard us sing and many came over to check what was happening. The children proudly told everybody that this was their Read Aloud story song. The next session had them creating their own songs after listening to a Bundelkhandi folk tale illustrated by Jitendra Thakur titled What a Song! They did this with great joy and I was happy that they were looking forward to more stories and activities.
The next session they came running to welcome us enthusiastically, and we had a good time with the story ‘The Watermelon Route’ by Quentin Greban. Together we laughed, ate a watermelon, and shared anecdotes. Today I see many of them changed and hope that this joy and enthusiasm continues.
Electronic devices are a very accessible medium that entices children and keeps them engaged for hours. Our role as a library educator is to encourage children to read actively by keeping in mind their reading interests.
Drawing children back into the world of stories was a struggle, which yielded joyful results. The power of stories had once again manifested itself.