Story Hour from Home
In a book titled Reader Come Home by neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, we are cautioned to not expose children younger than five years to screens. The book is presented with thoughtfully documented science of the brain that shows us how our circuitry is changing with digital reading. Wolf advocates biliteracy, teaching young children “to read physical […]
The Underworld of our Virtual Work Life
The clock reads 17 minutes to scheduled zoom session My heart reads […]
Are the Children Alright? Am I?
I was locked down for over six weeks in a home with no children. As I looked out onto the road, I would see a man on a bike, a woman on a bike, an occasional car driven by a woman or more often a man,but I never saw a child. I was beginning to miss the […]
Seeking Blessings
I, word lover that I am have been hanging onto words like ‘mantras’ that must be chanted appropriately for units of time inorder to be heard. This will pass. It will not affect our work. Our vision is stronger than this time. How can libraries be irrelevant ? The children will return to us. We […]
Tomie dePaola and the Joy his stories brought
Unknown to us at the time, as Tomie dePaola passed away on the 30th of March 2020, amongst the Bookworm team, we were all reading and preparing for a book discussion on The Clown of God, one of our more charged and purposeful discussions of 2020. We read Nana Upstairs Nana Downstairs to hundreds of school children every […]
Stories Connect Us
Social distancing in the library has resulted in empty library rooms, forlorn passages, a quiet hall and the depressing realisation that my day is empty without the children. I am struck by how much of my thinking and doing is because of the interactions that children and adults bring into my library work and just […]
I Remember the Stories
No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it. These are the first two lines of a poem by Dorianne Laux titled ‘For the Sake of Strangers’. I retrieve those lines here and more in this post as I attempt to share a rather singular story that emerged out […]
Training and Mentoring Program – Workshop 3
At the start of this, March 2019, we received a Grant from the British Council under the English Language Training and Mentoring Scheme to pilot a ‘ teacher – training’ program for primary school teachers. We have organised these trainings along with our Cipla Foundation supported work with schools and are piloting a Training and […]
A Geography of Visitors – A Vision Renewed
I love the idea of people walking into a library space and this year at Bookworm the numbers were high. We are in the old quarter of Panjim between the historic fountain and the legendary chapel and we are a library. So people do pop in and browse, walk through the rooms appreciate our work […]
Being Gandhi
Written by Paro Anand Pictures by Priya Kuriyan Published by Harper Collins Children’s Books Like Chandrasekar, the 13 year old protagonist in the story – many of us feel that we have notionally reduced the month of October to remembering Gandhi as an ideal or a symbol of ‘freedom’ through school program – projects – […]