Bringing Teachers into Library Practice
At Bookworm, our approach has been to work with children. This was not a strategic decision, but an organic one. It emerged from the simple truth, that children are open, receptive, warm, welcoming and critical, story worlds make immediate sense, they don’t need to be ‘taught’. Ursula LeGuin writes, “ Children have a seemingly innate […]
Reading Lila’s Loose Tooth
It sat there upon the New Arrivals shelf in the library, not quite fitting between different sized books, slightly askew in its place and almost nudging itself to me. Lila’s Loose Tooth it read , by Mamata Nainy and Habib Ali. All new ! I was on the calendar to facilitate story time for our […]
Exploring Partition in the Library
“Partition with a capital P signifies that this was a big event, “ said L, all of 13 years who was one of my participants in a Unit Study at Bookworm that was focusing on – The Partition. Ten children between 12 and 14 years gathered together every Wednesday for two hours over three months to […]
Book Recommendations
As an exercise in building our confidence around recommendations and inspiring conversations amongst readers, we have been hosting a series of weekly recommendation exercise at Bookworm. Team members recommend books to each other and we listen to a bunch of book talks every Monday on these recommendations. It is interesting to see what we are […]
Almost Trapped
At Bookworm our vision in practice is to take stories to children in diverse contexts to engender what Pat Mora calls ‘bookjoy’. It is close to fifteen years of this work on the ground and it surprised me to realise I felt trapped by a web of our own making. After weeks of deliberation by […]
The Enchanted Hour
The Enchanted Hour is a program we have only just begun to enter into with the Melwani Recreation Centre in Fontainhas, Panjim. But the feelings we are left with after a session appear to hold us into the month in a powerful way. As we sat down as a group to think about what we […]
The Late Flight
In our collective pursuit at Bookworm to extend our reach in Goa, we have finally ( after over 8 years of school outreach work) felt bold enough to invite teachers into our circle of learning. We feel ready to share what works and what is sustainable during a school calendar to bring reading joy. In […]
Book Talk with Young Adults
It began as a listing on our monthly calendar – Book Talk with Young Adults. For a library this must become a monthly offering but how do I gather these young adults ? Young adult reading is not often a social exercise and our reading culture is not always inclusive enough to welcome all readers […]
Magic in the Library
Empty entertainment in the library, kind of goes against the depth of how I feel about library work. Make no mistake, I strongly support fun and games, thrive on laughter and merriment and camaraderie enjoy music, chatter and banter but think it best fits around a collection, or a book, or some other literary themed […]
Series of Fortunate Events
2018 for Bookworm has been a year of many, many events. Some of which we engineer in our manic lets-make-a-difference kind of way and others have happened to us. In a conversation on our meeting-rug, there was a cloud of despondency around us. We had just experienced serious illness in one of our most loved […]