Rewind. Recap.

A lovely and adorable purple Yak named Grape reached our Bangalore office recently. Grape is travelling around the world as part of the ‘Yak Around the World Campaign‘. During their world tour, the yaks are highlighting changemakers and their innovative work, aiming to inspire people all over the world to think of new ways they can do good and have an impact.

Before we send Grape, the yak, off to another changemaker, we decided to take her to meet the lovely people at the Akshara Foundation. 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.

Grape also visited Bangalore’s Philately Museum and did some stamp spotting and brought back photographs of some of these interesting stamps.

Read about the Cauvery contest we are running along with our ‘Conserve Our Rivers, Save Water’ Campaign. The Principal of Akal Academy (EM), Cheema sent us a mail about the water conservation related activities being held in their school. They also sent us photographs from their successful event. Do you know of any such stories too? Share your story by mailing us at blog(at)prathambooks(dot)org. Time Out Bengaluru ran an article that featured Arghyam, the School India Water Portal and our water conservation campaign.

The Maharashtra Times also carried a review of some of our books.

We were so proud to find out that out of the 100 Indian children’s books showcased at the Moscow Book Fair, there were 30 published by Pratham Books.

The Right to Read Campaign seeks to build support for a change in Indian’s copyright laws to allow for conversion of content to formats that are easy for those who are visually impaired to access. BookBolé is a platform that enables visually impaired readers from across the world to connect and share accessible content.

It has been 140 years since the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, but his autobiography continues to be a bestseller.
Read an interesting article on how books are conserved in the Saraswathi Mahal Library in Thanjavur. Archie comics will soon be available in Indian languages and you may also find a few Indian characters in the comic.
Neil Gaiman is crowdsourcing a story via Twitter. Find out more about this experiment here. The Saffron Tree blog was running a week long blog-book festival called CROCUS (Celebration on Reading Other Culturally Unique Stories). The festival is over but you can still hop over to find a selection of folktales for you and your children to enjoy from around the world!

Uday Foundation’s Storytelling Programme for Little Patients is bringing smiles to the faces of children in hospitals. They are trying to organize storytelling performances by celebrities, artists, sports persons, teachers, writers, journalists and other volunteers.

Babar Ali’s story is a truly inspiring story of a boy who made it his mission to share the education he was receiving in his own way. Read about Babar Ali – possibly the youngest headmaster in the world. Also read about Operation Education : the story of three students who are bridging the gap between books and the people who don’t have access to them.

Have you heard about the interesting project called Question Box? The Question Box gives easy access to information in areas with illiteracy, language and technical barriers.

Here’s a little pinch to awaken you to an often neglected facet of parenting: Are your children, and the children around you getting their daily dose of salt? Or rather, Iodine?

Mala Kumar talks about how nursery rhymes go through many changes and get learnt in different ways. She asks whether we should/shouldn’t sanitise children’s rhymes?

Image Source: zedvox