Looking Ahead…

The academic year has begun and our Libraries in School (LiS) sessions have started last week. During the first school week we do not go into classes so as to give the children time to settle in and get used to the school schedule. In the second week, we enter the classrooms, book boxes and stories in hand, and create some magic through these library sessions. This year, I have begun to facilitate sessions at a Government Primary school (supported by Cipla Foundation) and I realised that I need to take a lot more things into consideration to enable this magic. Most of the children present are not just first generation learners but also new to the whole school experience. They have been pushed into school with no preschool experience and everything that is introduced to them is a completely new experience.

Our first LiS (Libraries in Schools) session is a book care session where we introduce the book collection and go through parts of the book, caring for our books etc. This bit is done in a fun way. One of us dresses up as a book doctor and enters the class and after some playacting, elicit responses about book care from the children. The children are encouraged to be responsible for their books. This initial session also has a component of creating their own personalised activity notebooks. Each child is given an activity notebook for story related activities. We encourage the children to draw their favorite objects on a sheet stuck on the cover of the notebooks and this activity makes the notebook into their very own personalized notebook with their drawings.

During this session, I instructed the children of Std1+2 to first think of anything they like and then choose colors and draw. The thinking seemed to have happened to some extent with a few, but the real struggle began after that. As my team member Vandana and I started distributing the notebooks and color boxes, many children looked flabbergasted.  A few reached out to open the box and check the colors while some just sat and looked at them. When I asked what happened, they asked me if the notebook was for them and  what to do with it? As I explained about drawing out what they liked on their notebooks, the children asked me ‘what is drawing?’. At this point I realised my folly. I had simply assumed that because these children are coming to school, they would know how to draw and color. However, they had never had the experience of holding a crayon or just scribbling on paper with different colors. I realised that our responsibility does not end with just providing access to a good collection of books. It actually starts there. These are children who may have never experienced print in this form. They have never experienced the joy of freely choosing a book, or the experience of expressing themselves through art. And through our library sessions we would be exposing them to all this, and more. When we lent out the books, I noticed that most of the children had placed their books upside down or back side front and were opening the book from the opposite side. So we moved around the class showing the children how to place a book, how to turn the pages and how to care for a book. Of course this would have to be a consistent effort on our part. Once the book was opened, a few asked what they should do now.

They needed to be encouraged to look at the pictures and to go through the book. I have been aware of some of these challenges and know that it is a tough road ahead as we have to take into consideration many factors starting from the children’s home to their surrounding environment. However, by taking the library into these classes, I feel we have at least taken the first step, in the right direction. We are poised now to create a world full of imagination, fun and magic in these classrooms through different stories.