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Pratham Books Champion : Sujata Suri (Deep Foundation)

As part of Litworld’s World Read Aloud Day celebrations, 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 Sujata Suri who works with Deep Foundation in Delhi. The session was conducted by Sujata Suri. She overseas operations at DEEP Foundation. She is also associated with UNESCO’s initiative, A Ray of Hope, and is volunteering as Advisor & Liaison(India). 
We celebrated World Read Aloud Day on the 7th of March, 2012 at Deep Foundation’s flagship reading room – the Henny Penny Libraries located at Vasant Kunj, New Delhi. Deep Foundation’s Library initiative already has 14 such Libraries/reading rooms under it’s wing and we are looking at opening another 11 in the next six months.
Books can play a very important role in shaping our lives and it is a well researched fact that human development is greatly advantaged by reading books. Unfortunately, with the changing times and the advent of the LCD revolution, inculcating a reading habit is becoming increasingly more difficult amongst children. A well read child always contributes effectively and positively towards nation building.
We at DEEP Foundation realize this importance and are attempting to provide a pleasant and fun filled platform for the young and tender minds to expand their potential in the world of books. Henny Penny Libraries , a joint effort by DEEP Foundation and A Ray of Hope – UNESCO Youth Ambassador For The Culture of Peace (www.unesco.co.uk), is a modest effort in that direction. Together we attempt to reach out to the underprivileged children who may otherwise spend their entire childhood without ever having read a proper “storybook” and miss the immense pleasure that one gets when they hold a new
storybook in their hand.
Our children come from the neighboring villages of Kishan Garh and Mehrauli and they are children of daily-wage migrant labour.

Today we conducted the session with our older children. Since all of them have started reading reasonably fluently, we experimented with different stories. Each one got a book that they read aloud to the rest of their friends. Subsequently, we tried to create a new story from 3 different stories. We used the Pratham Level 1 and level 2 books for this purpose. That was a fun exercise and we all enjoyed being creative.

Since this was a day before the festival of Holi, the story telling session ended on a colourful note with colour, the traditional “gujiya” and other sweetmeats.
We plan to conduct similar sessions in our Najafgarh centre and also with our younger children at the Vasant Kunj centre this weekend.

Thank you Sujata 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.


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DISCLAIMER :Everything here is the personal opinions of the authors and is not read or approved by pratham books before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here