Every child in our LiS program gets to see a new set of books when the year starts and then soon after the Diwali holidays they get to see another one. This year as the Diwali holidays were getting over, the team sat together and thought of ways in which the collection would be opened up in an exciting way. During the discussion, ‘treasure hunt’ came up as a possibility followed by ideas of different ways in which we could do it.
Some of the ideas were about matching an object to an image inside the book, another was to fill up the missing letters to make the title and find the book with that title or finding a book with a similar setting of the story given to them. We thought of these and a few more ideas as we felt that it will be good to have different types of treasure hunt clues designed for different Grades.
While we started preparing the clues, we learned that some ideas like matching the object are interesting but practically it was not very feasible. Since the number of children in each class is about 40 and the number of books that go in each of the book boxes for the class is about 70. Keeping this aspect in mind and each Resource Person having to plan for 8 such classes would have been a bit too much with so many objects to collect and sort and arrange.
So in another meeting we planned to discuss how we would do it. In this meeting, we kept the practical aspects in mind like limited time, many books and to focus more on our objective on ‘opening up the collection’. Through brainstorming and discussions, our objective became clear which was to get the children to browse through as many books as possible. This time we thought of just keeping two categories, one for Grades 1 and 2 and the other for Grades 3 and 4. The clues for Grade 1 and 2 were to find the similar pictures in the book that they get on clip art which we gave as a printout. While for Grade 3 and 4 it was to find a word that was printed from a high-frequency word list in the book.
In the school when we went with the clues and passed them around in a basket, the children were super anxious to find the books. While the Grade 3 and 4 searched for the words in their hands, some started chanting the words, a few said it aloud so others could help and some just looked hard for that word. While doing this, after some time the children could not resist looking at the pictures and what was there so a few children took more time than the rest. The children who had found their books quickly went through it, some started to read it and some peeped into their friend’s book to see what is there. Similarly, the same things were happening in Grade 1 and 2 where the children had to find a similar picture to that of the clip art that they choose when the basket was passed around. It was really nice looking at them turning page, opening up the flaps, feeling the surfaces and looking with keen attention to find the pictures.
While the children had their time with the books they gave us feedback about which book they liked and what they found interesting in it. Some children who could not read the text in the books that they had found through their clues chose to get another book from the collection so that they could read. Overall it was a lovely activity of being lost among the books and discovering the treasure.
