During the months leading up to the school exams in March, the children are occupied with Tuition classes so the lull in library attendance has been used as a good time to refresh our stock of illustrated children’s books. Our aim is to provide new and interesting fiction and non-fiction Hindi, English and dual Language books in the library for the children to keep their interest in reading fresh.
Having gone through our stock and the publishers lists we were able to see what we needed to replace and what new we should buy. In January we ordered 57 Hindi and 50 English books from the Children’s Book Trust in Delhi. Ravindra has been busy entering them into our system and categorising them. Once these are complete we will go through the other most popular publishers in our library such as National Book Trust, Pratham and Tulika.
The new books will be launched into the library after the exams in March.
Nishtha Reading Fluency Programme
It was noticed by several of our volunteers that many children loved to flip though our picture books but few really took time to sit and read them cover to cover. They did of course love to be read to! It was clearly necessary to help the children to develop the reading proficiency to enable them to discover the joy of reading for themselves.
With the help of a series of books produced by NCERT, we introduced a programme in which individual children take turns to sit with Ravindra and gradually read through this excellent graded series of story books. Ravindra encourages them gently to spell out difficult words and rewards the completion of each of the 4 levels with a treat. More than 30 students aged 5-11 years have so far completed the programme. We are now planning to do the same, using a different series of books that we have yet to find to encourage their English reading.
