On 16th October, Grape was invited to attend a training being conducted for librarians at the Govt. Urdu Model Primary School on Tannery Road, Bangalore. With 45 enthusiastic librarians in the room and 4 eager teachers of the library team, the session started. The library team has planned two activities per month for all the libraries and will start this initiative with the Shivajinagar libraries. The librarians were asked to discard their roles of librarians and be children at this session and learn and participate like they would want the children at their libraries to participate. Arvind Venkatadri, head of the library team, let his other colleagues take over after announcing that magic does exist and that these activities would transform the libraries into magical places.
The session was a multilingual session where Urdu, Kannada, Hindi and English were spoken with equal ease. After the manuals were handed out in the preferred languages, Ramesh, Latha and Nirumpama (from the Akshara library team) did a fantastic job of explaining the entire process.
Grape watched on as….
Questions raised…and answered
A skit enacted (where Grape’s yak cap elicited many laughs from the librarians when they had to use it as a prop)…
Another round of questions ensued…
A book reading session took place…
Librarians ventured out in the hot sun and stood in the compound to learn about mathematics…
Where librarians became parts of the atmosphere and rays of the sun to explain how the sky turned blue…
And more book readings…
Everyone tried to solve a puzzle which involved sand, haldi, marbles and plastic balls..
…and another book reading!
“Oh, what fun it is to be a librarian”, said Grape!
But we shall stop talking and let the pictures do the talking. Read the captions beneath the pictures for a little more information.
So, when Grape asks us – “What did you do to change the world today?”, our answer would be – “help create magical libraries with the help of Akshara Foundation”.