Bookworm Trust

Live from Lockdown Library by Bookworm Trust – Episode 001 with guest Arvind Gupta

 Hosted by Nayan Mehrotra and Anandita Rao Links mentioned in the podcast Archive. org Arvind Gupta’s Website Pratham Books Storyweaver Amar Chitra Katha NBT India Digital Library Of India Listen to the other episodes at https://www.bookwormgoa.in/category/library/live-from-lockdown-library/  Podcast introduction and artwork by Alia Sinha Intro music courtesy: My Day by KhalafNasirs (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under […]

What we have been doing during the lockdown:

In this time of social isolation, we have been engaged in a number of long distance activities and discussions. Sharing some of these below. About Stories Like the fish that is not aware of the water, in our day to day work, we rarely pause to think about stories. The lockdown enabled us to offer […]

Recommended Books for 10 – 13 year olds, told humorously

Moin and the Monsters – Anushka Ravishankar Moin the Monster Songster – Anushka Ravishankar Mayil will Not be Quiet – Niveditha Subramaniam Mostly Madly Mayil – Niveditha Subramaniam and Sowmya Rajendran Ha Ha Ha Hasya – Ashok Rajagopalan Dungeon Tales – Venita Coelho My Nana is a nutcase – Ranjit Lal Book Uncle and Me […]

Literacy Playground

Amidst the COVID-19 lockdown, schools and others, through parents are enabling learning using digital media. How does this work? Does it work for everyone? In the last few weeks, we have been reflecting on the inequity of the digital divide and sharing an infographic to help us all think together for a way forward. 1) […]

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 […]

Stories Connect Us 

Social distancing in the library has resulted in empty library rooms, forlorn passages, a quiet hall and the depressing realisation that my day is empty without the children. I am struck by how much of my thinking and doing is because of the interactions that children and adults bring into my library work and just […]

Kids Cook!

I have always liked cooking and baking. However, when it was decided in the September of 2017 that I was to hold “Kids Cook”, a cooking class for children, I felt nervous and excited at the same time. I worried about how I was going to conduct this class, whether the children would like what they made, […]

Stitching in the Library

Besides the books, an element in Bookworm that runs through the shelves, across the walls and hides in secret spaces in the Library, are the stitches. Stitching is a much practiced craft at Bookworm, and each person who joins the team learns to stitch, from hand stitched logos, to collaborative stitching activities, that when put […]

I Remember the Stories

  No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it.   These are the first two lines of a poem by Dorianne Laux titled ‘For the Sake of Strangers’. I retrieve those lines here and more in this post as I attempt to share a rather singular story that emerged out […]

Being Gandhi

Written by Paro Anand Pictures by Priya Kuriyan Published by Harper Collins Children’s Books  Like Chandrasekar, the 13 year old protagonist in the story – many of us feel that we have notionally reduced the month of October to remembering Gandhi as an ideal or a symbol of ‘freedom’ through school program – projects – […]