THE CHILDREN. THE LIBRARY
The generator would come on and drown out any conversation that was going on. Yuvraj noticed me grimace and began to countdown and lo and behold when he got to 8, the generator stopped. I looked at him and indicated he had magic. Every time during this library session which is a part of the […]
Alban Couto Community Library children come visiting
In every room at the library , the air was ruffled – there were children and they had come back ! Six readers from our Alban Couto Community Library ( ACCL) with Wendy our own library educator, and parent Akshi came to Bookworm library. It was a joy to have children as young as three […]
An Exit and A (Re)Entry
One way in which I have come to know myself better is in the way others refer to me. All qualities that refer to me have been rather grace filled and compel me to live a better life to examine more closely my actions and intentions and to try and live upto them. Some of […]
Learnings from Displays
As a part of our mentoring support to a sister organisation, Prayog in Bihar, Nayan, Anandita and I found ourselves in Gopalganj Dt. of Bihar on a pleasant week in December 2020. The world of the pandemic and social distancing was cast aside to keep the glow of library possibilities alive. One of the requests […]
Six Book Relay Teams – One Book
A key element of library work is that of interaction. Texts are read, shared, discussed, dismissed, awaited as children in our pre COVID libraries gathered at regular intervals on our shared journey of becoming readers. This interruption in our social lives simply meant we had to think again. As is want to happen when intentions […]
Story Hour from Home
In a book titled Reader Come Home by neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, we are cautioned to not expose children younger than five years to screens. The book is presented with thoughtfully documented science of the brain that shows us how our circuitry is changing with digital reading. Wolf advocates biliteracy, teaching young children “to read physical […]
The Underworld of our Virtual Work Life
The clock reads 17 minutes to scheduled zoom session My heart reads […]
Are the Children Alright? Am I?
I was locked down for over six weeks in a home with no children. As I looked out onto the road, I would see a man on a bike, a woman on a bike, an occasional car driven by a woman or more often a man,but I never saw a child. I was beginning to miss the […]
Seeking Blessings
I, word lover that I am have been hanging onto words like ‘mantras’ that must be chanted appropriately for units of time inorder to be heard. This will pass. It will not affect our work. Our vision is stronger than this time. How can libraries be irrelevant ? The children will return to us. We […]
Tomie dePaola and the Joy his stories brought
Unknown to us at the time, as Tomie dePaola passed away on the 30th of March 2020, amongst the Bookworm team, we were all reading and preparing for a book discussion on The Clown of God, one of our more charged and purposeful discussions of 2020. We read Nana Upstairs Nana Downstairs to hundreds of school children every […]