Pratham Books Champion : Ritika Chawla
13 years ago
As part of Litworld’s World Read Aloud Daycelebrations, we decided to ask our community if they would conduct storytelling sessions in their cities. 50 awesome champions decided to take part and ‘celebrate the power of words’. We will be sharing the stories of all our champions through our blog.
Today’s story comes from Ritika Chawla who conducted a storytelling session in Mumbai. Ritika is a second year fellow with Teach for India. She teachs grade 3 at MHB Municipal School in Malwani, Malad, Mumbai. Hery class has 72 students from low income backgrounds and her life revolves mostly around them. Before joining TFI, she was working as a Business Analyst in Delhi. She loves reading, watching movies and talking. Follow Ritika by visiting her blog : findyourself-rc.blogspot.com.
Ritika writes …
On 10th March, 2012 (Saturday), 70 champions of grade 3, MHB Municipal School, Malad and their teacher celebrated World Read Aloud Day. They read the story – Samira’s Awful Lunch. While the teacher read the story, the students asked and answered questions about the various characters in the story including the cow, ants, sparrow, crow, butterfly, etc. and what they ate and why. The students heard the story with rapt attention and were excited to answer every question.
The activities that followed after the story were learning names of new vegetables and drawing them. The students also drew the characters and named them. This helped in building vocabulary for the kids in a fun learning way. They were also asked to carry to class one food item they did not like. After hearing Samira’s story, most of them realised the importance of eating proper food. The session did not end there. After drawing what the students didn’t like and answering the reason for their dislike, every child in the class made a promise to atleast try and eat the same once. We also had a discussion on eating a balanced diet and its importance and how everything that we ate contributed negatively or positively towards our body.
On the following Monday, many students shared with the class of what they didn’t like and they still tried it. The outcome was that alot of students in the class now don’t create a ruckuss over their tiffin and try eating things, such as green vegetables and the most disliked vegetable – bittergourd (karela) has also become a part of their diet.
A story goes a long way in adding to the learning of a person. Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today and I hope the story of ‘Samira’s Awful Lunch’ does add learning to the lives of many children like it did for my students.
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Thank you Ritika for spreading the joy of reading!
Click here to read the stories sent in by all the Pratham Books Champions.
Note : If any of you want to be a Pratham Books Champion and join us on our journey of getting ‘a book in every child’s hand’, write to us at web(at)prathambooks(dot)org.
