Sharing Susheela's Kolams

Pratham Books has been instrumental in organizing this amazing storytelling event,all across India as part of International Literacy Day celebrations. They've also generously offered the book, Susheela's Kolams for download from this link if someone is interested in organizing impromptu sessions in their community, both in the country and outside.

Saffron Tree is honored to share this note from Pratham Books.
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1 day. 1 book. 250 storytelling sessions. All states – Working towards a united India.


Join Pratham Books and over 250 storytellers in all of India's 28 states as we weave a story that unites thousands of children in India on International Literacy Day (8th September 2012)!

At Pratham Books we have a dream, to see “A book in every child's hand”. We understand that to reach the 200 million + children in India is going to take a while. So in the meantime we decided to take 1 book, 1 story to as many children possible on a single day throughout the country.

The idea is to encourage children to fall in love with reading. This initiative is part of the Pratham Books' Champions program where we encourage our community of volunteers to conduct reading sessions. These sessions are conducted free of cost and mostly with children from under-served communities.

The quality of these sessions have been outstanding and this encouraged us to dream of 100 sessions throughout country [at least one in each state]. We were a bit overwhelmed when that number slowly reached 250! Read some heart-wrenching and some logistical nightmare stories below!

We also hope to create a Limca record with this initiative in the hope that it brings to light the issues of joyful reading, access and multilingual publishing.

The book chosen for this campaign is one of our just released title “Susheela's Kolams”. Its a wonderful book about a little girl who loves kolams and dreams big!

As a not-for-profit multilingual publisher, the sessions are going to be conducted in 5 languages that the book is available in. [English, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Telugu.]


To know more about our champions program please visit the links below:
http://prathambooks.org/pratham-books-champions
http://blog.prathambooks.org/search/label/champions

Some beautiful on-ground stories:
Please visit: http://www.prathambooks.org/stories-field
Also attached excel file.