Celebrating International Literacy Day with 2500+ Storytellers and 2300+ Sessions

A few months ago we had an internal discussion on the book we wanted to choose for this year’s ‘One Day-One Story‘ event. There was a unanimous vote for one of our new books – The Boy and the Drum. This was the first play we had done – a story book and play rolled into one! The possibilities to use this book, interpret it and remix it seemed endless. Also, maybe many people would get kids to enact the play too – thus making kids champions too. And that is exactly what happened!

As soon as we put out our call for champions, people signed up to receive the book and started preparing. Stories started pouring in – someone wanted to do a Skype session, another organization was ready to take the book to 163 villages, people were preparing skits, translating the books, creating props, singing songs and more. Like always – there was an abundance of joy and an awesome community coming together to spread the joy of reading.

In the 4th edition, the ‘One Day-One Story’ campaign will see :

This year’s chosen book is The Boy and the Drum (written by Umesh P N and illustrated by Rajiv Eipe. Written by an experienced teacher of theatre, it is an introduction to a new way of ‘reading’ a book. A folktale about giving and kindness transforms into a lively play! 

If you’ve just found out about our International Day celebrations, fret not! To conduct your own storytelling session, please register, download the book and share it with a child/children. A big shout out to :

• Read/download the original book in English, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu and Urdu.
• Other options that you could use : an illustration only version, a re-levelled version (for younger kids), a  simple version (without the stage directions).
• Look at the activity suggestions to get ideas for your session.
• Download/Read the community translations in these languages : Tamil (N Chokkan), Sanskrit (Anand Viswanathan), Odia (Smruti Ranjan Jena), Gujarati (Ashok Parmar), Odia (Pratham Odisha). Big thanks to Vikram Gakhar and Renu Seth for helping us too.
• Radio Mirchi did a wonderful rendition of the book in Hindi. Listen to this lovely radio play. Thanks Pallavi and the Varanasi team for organizing this.

Apart from the champions in India, we also have champions joining us from Nepal, Pakistan, USA, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Kenya and Malawi. 

If you want to attend a session, we as well as some of our champions are conducting events that are open to the public. Check the full list at : http://blog.prathambooks.org/2015/09/the-boy-and-drum-public-events-you-can.html

If you are sharing pictures/news about your event, please use the hashtag #PBChamps on Facebook and Twitter so that we and other champions can also follow your updates. You can tweet us at @prathambooks and find us on Facebook at : www.facebook.com/prathambooks.

Join Pratham Books and 2500+ storytellers in sharing the joy of stories.

About the campaign : 

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. In the meantime, we decided to take ‘One Day, One Story’ campaign to as many children possible on a single day throughout the country.

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 Pratham Books’ Champions program is a one-of its kind volunteer program that has scaled to a national level with more and more volunteers wanting to join us in this movement.