Joy of Reading blog

Author: (Giri Smruthi, Bengaluru, Intern 2023 June, )

During my summer break I was looking for an internship with a non-profit organisation, and when I happened to come across Joy Of Reading, I immediately knew that I had met a perfect match for me. As an English major student, I always had a penchant for reading. When I realised the opportunity that was waiting in front of me, to pass down the magic of reading to the children, I had to absolutely sign up. JoR was something different, quite unique in their aspirations; and as an avid reader, I felt a strong connection with their ideas of service. Their aim of developing reading habits in children and in turn improving literacy really resonated with my spirit.

I had the wonderful opportunity to work under the guidance of Mrs. Harini Raghavan Ma’am, and the least to say, it was quite an enriching experience. I was assigned to the documentation department under which I was able to aid in developing a systemic tool for metric collection for the Library Standard Operating procedure project for the TSWREIS Schools, Government of Telangana. I also took part in enhancing library materials, such as activity planner. While working on this, my previous experiences acting as a background helped me to provide ideas to make the planner as fun-filled and holistic as possible. I had to research and brainstorm to come up with the optimal activities in the order of increasing difficulty. I am glad to have undertaken these tasks as they enhanced my creativity and critical thinking skills.

As part of the operations department I was given the scope of sorting and classifying books according to levels. Through this, I was able to learn about the various classification systems and sorting styles of books in order to help in the beneficial upgrading of reading skills. Moreover, I also able to work with the program manager Ms. Neha, who was sweet and helpful while showing me the ropes.

As a member of the training department I took up the role of acting as a volunteer in training sessions. One of the training sessions I had attended provided me with eye-opening encounters. From assisting Mrs. Harini Ma’am in guiding the librarians of TSWREIS through various interactive sessions, I was also given the opportunity to present a part of the activity planner I contributed to in developing. This gave me a better perspective applying the learnings on the fieldwork, and communicating during training sessions also helped me to strengthen my interpersonal skills.

My favourite part throughout the month-long period of work was to interact with students of Madinaguda Government School. I could achieve this via assisting in reading level assessments, which deepened my understanding of the classification system and operating it in the practical arena. We conducted interactive library sessions to encourage reading amongst the students. I felt completely satiated in the spirit of service to the society through connecting with the students about the wonderland of stories. With the help of games, cultural activities and interactions, students and I bonded well and I could feel them developing an interest in reading. With the opening of the library, the students flocked in, and always were pumped up to explore the adventures reading held for them.

Within this short span of time, Jor had occupied a special place in my heart. The team and my mentor were patient, understanding. My respect for them became entrenched whenever I witnessed how enthusiastic towards improving the students’ reading and learning habits they were. These experiences let me interact with people from various backgrounds, and expand my societal awareness. I was provided with a good career experience in relation to my course and was facilitated in growth as an individual.

Through my pathway in the organisation, I’m deeply grateful for the exposure and experience I could get, but more so for the bonds we made and the way my life has changed as a result. Now, I look forward to the time when I go back to the fieldwork, contribute to society and give back to the wondrous world of stories that whence I once found my solace. Drawing the curtains on my monologue, I would like to conclude with a small wish for a beautiful future: like I found a place to call my second home in Joy Of Reading, I hope to see a multitude of new faces joining us in the journey towards learning and discovery of creative spaces.

Previous blog entry – in case you missed

How did it all pan out?

The training was over and Alokit had its ground task force helping the schools with Foundation Literacy and Numeracy – supporting the schools in executing their program. A WhatsApp group was formed to encourage teachers to share their work during library hour. We received a lot of good updates from the schools. The Alokit team at ground, Amzad, Elizabeth and Venkatesh also monitored the library sessions happening at schools.

Check out the feedback from a few schools on how the books are being used

50% of students from 3rd class to 5th class completed Green level books. One of the students’ reached White level books. Keeping constant effort from teachers and students with maintaining the library period weekly twice in their timetable. Thank you so much teachers

**From MPPS Madwar**: Today I visited MPPS Madwar (Marikal complex). They are using joy of reading books in the last period and one of the teachers is guiding the students in between the reading. Thank you so much teachers for taking initiatives

Today I visited MPUPS Shashanpally and HM sir told me that on alternate days library books are given to students for half an hour. More than 50% students from 3rd and 4th classes are able to read green level books and these books helped students to improve their reading Levels.

Check out a few schools on how they setup their libraries

Some heartwarming feedback

Check out some of the read alouds by the kids. FOr the sake of privacy we have cut some portions of the videos where the private details are present.

MPUPS Mandipally – It was awesome to see the way teachers have maintained the record of the Library Book…

Narayanpet holds a special place in our heart as this was our first CSR project (funded by Sakku group). It was also an inroad into a rural place in Telangana for us. It gave us insights about schools in small places with limited resources but with a great set of passionate teachers. Hoping to fund more libraries in the future in Narayanpet. Thank you for reading about our journey and Ciao until we share our next story with you.

Previous blog entry – in case you missed

Books were handed out to the schools, but the training was yet to happen. It meant we had one more trip to Narayanpet. The next few days went in working with Amzad to figure out training dates,  the teachers who needed to attend the training , venue for the training and many more logistics. Thanks to the Alokit team at the ground headed by Amzad all the arrangements happened at a fine pace.

28^th October 2022 – was the day of our training. We decided to drive over the same day and do the training and come back. Narayanpet was around 170km+ and to drive the same day meant we had an early start. But then the previous night we heard that there was a “paada yatra” (Foot pilgrimage) of a central opposition political candidate and hence we could not take the main highway route. But that did not deter us. The early start became an earlier start.  I took my car. Shiney, Sailaja, Pramod accompanied me and we started around 5:30am to Narayanpet for the training. It was a long drive and an adventurous one. We had to go through several side routes and through several village roads in order to avoid the traffic blocks. But the plus side was we got to see some really beautiful scenery interspersed with small villages. We reached Narayanpet around 9am and reached the venue for the training which was a government girls high school at Dhoolpet.

The session started after introductions and the headmaster of the school gave a speech on the importance of reading books and inculcating the reading habit in children. The training was a one day workshop, covering the topics of leveling books, interactive read aloud technique, basics of library management best practices, running classroom library (since most of the schools did not even have enough classrooms) and handling struggling readers.  The teachers were engaged during the sessions and found the sessions useful.

By the time our training was scheduled there was a change of the collector for the district (!!) . Shri Koya Sree Harsha also was supportive and came to watch our training for a few minutes. This motivated the teachers even more who realized that the management considered this very important. The collector distributed the books to all the schools that were donated by Sakku group (Thank you once more Sakku for enabling this). The training ended around 4 pm with the assurance from the teachers that they would put the books to good use.

The press report regarding the program from the collectors office

It was 5pm before we could leave. But ofcourse how could we miss the famous Narayanpet sarees and not treat ourselves after a long productive day. We were guided by the teachers to a local weaver who has been in the handloom industry for several generations. Sailaja , Shiney and myself after buying sarees left Narayanpet around 630pm along with Pramod who was happily sitting in the car and working while we were saree shopping. We reached Hyderabad around 10 pm in a happy mood after having a very productive day.

You must be wondering ok what next – check out our next blog post from Narayanpet again.

Previous blog entry – in case you missed it.

The day finally came when my first visit to Narayanpet happened. I met with Pramod and Venkatesh (also from Alokit) at the PV Narasimha Rao flyer on a September morning, embarking on a long ride to Narayanpet. Our first destination was the district collectors office.

We had an appointment with the district collector,  Smt Hari Chandana Dasari garu. Luckily we had a smooth ride and reached the collector’s office in time . We met with Smt Hari Chandana and had a fruitful discussion regarding  the project and the plan moving forward wrt distribution of books, training and the schools selected etc. She was very supportive and wanted children to have access to a good library and develop an interest in reading. She is a very dynamic person constantly working to improve the very many facets of the district.

We also met with a government officer , who would facilitate with the arrangement of training and the logistics of coordinating with the schools.

The latter part of the visit was the best as I did some school visits and met some wonderful passionate teachers. Here are a few glimpses from my visit.  

The first was a visit to the government school in Danwada, Telangana. The school teachers had come up with their own Teacher Learning Material (TLM) that would help facilitate building strong concepts of fundamentals on Literacy.

The headmaster of the school was very supportive of Alokits FLN (Foundational literacy and numeracy )program. He showed us the monthly reading and writing assessment exams prepared by the teachers to continuously evaluate children and figure out the improvement strides. The school meticulously also prepared course content to address the gaps in student fundamentals. What I liked most was the headmasters involvement of the community which includes the parents as well, to support the study plan of the children.

Narayanpet has some schools that cater to the tribal areas as well. One such was the Manipur Thanda. A Thanda is a clustered settlement or community of Banjaras (the local tribe present).

There is only one classroom in the school with children from the first to fifth grade. Alokit has trained the teachers to do level based teaching for both Math and language. This means the children irrespective of the grade they belong to, are grouped based on their English knowledge and math knowledge levels. And the teacher teaches each group according to their level. Here Ms. Radhika has been religiously
following the technique and the children are happy learning under her.

Next we visited Kamsanpally where we met Ms. Swetha and the HM Mr. Kistaiah. Here too we saw good TLMs created by the teaching staff and an enthusiastic principal who is devoted to the improvement of the foundational skills of the children. The training and support from Alokit has helped these schools to be innovative with their methods of teaching.

Finally the D Day arrived – the formal inauguration of our libraries happened on 21^st Sept 2022.

Ms. Hari Chandana Garu – District Collector of Narayanpet graced the occasion and inaugurated the library at the school in Baherpet, Narayanpet . The collector arrived and engaged with the students regarding the library and made sure the children also cut the ribbon along with her thus formally inaugurating the library. Here is a tweet from her supporting the initiative

Yours truly was asked to light the lamp once the collector left and perform a small pooja praying to the supreme power for the success of the endeavor and beautiful beginnings. The teachers, children and I recited a sloka (prayer verse) on Goddess Saraswati (the goddess of learning) jointly and threw open the library .

Check out the next part for the rest of the Narayanpet journey

How it all began?

One day during Feb/March 2022 Sai Pramod, from Alokit called me to talk about the Ankuram project in Narayanpet, Telangana that aimed to work on the Foundation and Numerical Literacy in around 55 schools, spanning multiple districts and mandals.  As part of the same, they also wanted to establish libraries in schools and hence the call to Joy of Reading.

Narayanpet is a relatively new district located in the Southern part of Telangana and shares borders with Karnataka and Maharashtra. Its about 170km from Hyderabad

Fun fact: : Narayanpet is famous for its handloom industry and the Narayanpet sarees are popular throughout the state !! In case you are wondering about our title 😊 .

Ankuram was a large project and involved working closely with the education department of the government in order to see good results. Towards end of April an online meeting happened between Joy of Reading, Alokit and the government education official.  The demographics of the schools, criteria for selection of schools etc was discussed. The initial target was to setup libraries atleast for around 20 schools across the different mandals.

Talk about coincidences or the universe conspiring to make things happen  – Our first corporate sponsorship allocation came through in March 2022 as well when the Narayanpet project came our way.  Narayanpet district schools required English story books in the lower levels.  So we started working with wholesale suppliers, for books
that would be fun and easy to read and would attract a child to pick up the book. A set of 91 books was finalized for each school. It consisted of a mix of Pepper series, Early Grade Reader series, Funny Photo Phonics, Read Along stories, Rabindranath Tagore story series, Bruno series, and a few Information books (Great Junior Encyclopedia, 200 Facts and Questions on various topics).  Lots of coordination has to be done to get them to our storage space which was in a narrow steep gully.

Thanks to Sakku group who enabled funding of books for 20 schools in Narayanpet.

Pramod then came and took the whole bunch of boxes in his car and took them to Narayanpet on one of his visits, thus transporting the books without incurring any transport costs.

 It has always been the selfless efforts of several volunteers who are responsible for the very many behind the scenes effort in pulling together a project. When it takes a village to educate a child imagine how many it would take to educate a village full of schools !! Check out our next part on what happened thereafter.

Hello! My name is Diya, and I am a student and a volunteer with Joy of Reading.

As a child, I loved stories. I was fortunate enough to always have access to a library, and my constant access to books has allowed my love of stories to persist to this day. I adored Dr. Seuss and Mo Willems, and I devoured all their picture books. As I got older and began to read longer books, I immersed myself in the fantastic worlds of Roald Dahl and Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House. I still love to read today, even if I do not have as much time for it. My love for reading from a young age is partly what inspired me to join Joy of Reading: it pains me to think of children who do not get to experience what I could throughout my childhood.

I have been volunteering with Joy of Reading since the summer of 2019, when I attended a book sorting event with a couple close friends. It was meant to be a one-time thing: going in, I had no idea what Joy of Reading was about, and I just wanted to get a few more volunteer hours under my belt. As I began to learn more about Joy of Reading and its mission, I developed a fascination with the organization. I have always loved to read, and I became invested in the cause, which brings books to children in India without access to them. I began volunteering by scanning and boxing books for shipment. Joy of Reading has collected thousands of books that are ready for shipment, but the boxes need to be labelled with the titles of the books inside. I spent my time taking boxes home and scanning the books inside. I enjoyed it—I loved doing my part to help the cause! This year, I began working on the blog. I hope to continue volunteering in the future!

The JoR Hour – What , How & more …

Joy of Reading (JoR) conducted ‘JoR Hour’ a  pilot program of structured reading at TSWRS Narsingi, Telangana, India with a team of 4 volunteers (Sailaja, Shiney, Vandana, Harini), for the academic year 2019 – 2020. The JoR hour was conducted during the library hours for the children. 

We conducted the JoR hour twice a week for two classes of fifth graders. Each class consisted of 40 children. Two of us were always present during each session and at rare times all the four of us were present to provide the much needed attention to individual groups of children.  .

The books that JoR donated were levelled based on the GROW By methodology from Hippocampus.  In order for children to pick out the book at the right level we first measured reading levels of all the children. The children were then grouped according to their reading levels to facilitate like minded support groups and also help us in conducting targeted level based Interactive Read Aloud Sessions.

During the Library Hour

The children checked out books of their own choice at their reading level. It’s important to note that the children were the ones who chose what book to read (at their level)  during the library hour. Choice Reading is important to facilitate interest in reading. We also gave them a small exercise at the end of the story to express their own opinions and understanding of the story either in their local language or English. After finishing a book at their level and the exercise assigned, children were encouraged to take any book at any level and read. 

Volunteers conducted Interactive Read Aloud (IRA) Sessions for one or two groups  using books according to the level of the group. We adopted a round robin technique across the groups during the week to make sure every group was exposed to IRA. During the read alouds, reading and comprehension techniques were also taught so that children knew how to read a book successfully even if they did not understand every word in the book. At the end of the Read Aloud we asked the children to explain the content of one page in their own words..  

We also had a couple of struggling readers groups per class. These children struggled to read in English and also in comprehending the text. There were also children who were able to read the text but could not comprehend what they read. We gave extra attention to the struggling readers group.A  volunteer conducted the Interactive Read Aloud session with struggling readers group consistently every week during this program. Every child was also asked to read one page of the book by themselves to develop confidence in reading.  We also helped them learn FRY’s sight words .Thus during the JoR hour, the children read at least one book at their level and also completed a fun and a simple exercise. This systematic approach helped develop interest in reading amongst the children and helped us determine their understanding..

What did we see?

We used the Hippocampus level measurement – GROW BY methodology (Green, Red, Orange, White, Blue, Yellow) – increasing order of difficulty. Our observations from the 5th A and 5th B class.

Quantitative Results

VB 
(*) 50% of Green reduced to 10%  
(*) 16% of Orange increased to 48% Orange+  
VA 
(*) 70% of Green reduced to 25% 
(*) 7.5 % Orange increased to 25%

Qualitative Results

 
(*) "Principals  from other TSWRS schools who visited the Narsingi school, observed that quite a few  5th graders attempted to speak in English and were impressed. 
(*) Children attempted to speak in English whenever they could with the volunteers.    
(*) Every group enacted a skit based on one story they chose at their level   

This testimonial from an English Teacher on the reading journey of the students was very encouraging.  
  “I observe a subtle difference in the 5th class children this year. They don’t seem to waste time roaming around, when they have free time but they seem to use their time either in art, reading, writing or something else. I have not observed this in other class children so far. The 5th class kids are more mature, and their character is much better.” She believed that reading has made a significant difference. This was an intangible outcome but invaluable as inculcating moral values is a life long learning !

These results were observed after a period of 7 months with the JoR hour being conducted twice a week. With a systematic approach, more than 60% of the class moved up a reading level. The children also went through their regular school courses which also contributed to the improvement. However the qualitative observations was a testimony that the program had helped in multiple fronts especially with the increase in the number of children attempting to speak in English.  Reading books according to one’s level made the whole reading experience pleasant and provided the required confidence to children that they could read English story books! 

The reading level knowledge could come handy while teaching English . Children could learn and apply  grammar concepts and comprehension techniques with text at their level (rather than understanding it from one standard text ). 

Many of the children who joined TSWRS at 5th grade were from local language medium schools. Due to less exposure to the English language the children fell in the struggling readers group. However wIth focussed attention from volunteers and strong determination from children, more than 50% of children at the struggling readers group moved one level up as we observed from the results. A few hard workers improved more than one reading level up. A handful of children did not make any progress which was understandable. 

A 5th class English text book @ TSWRS is at Orange level and a quick and effective technique needs to be adopted to bridge the gap in English levels.  Learning the language through stories is fun, interesting and last but not the least effective. And reading regularly helps in inculcating the reading habit as well. We were able to achieve two objectives through our effort ! In our own style, the moral of the story is “Aim to get two mangoes with one stone !! “

Level Improvement Graphs

Legend
“GREEN- ”  means struggling readers at Green level
“GREEN” means readers at Green level

We have ‘-‘ group just to create 2 groups within a level. The ‘-‘ group is a bit lower than the regular Group i.e RED- < RED

.

Future Plans

Our plan is to continue to equip librarians and English teachers with tools to help them in their teaching journey, so that their students pick up the right book and continue to progress in their reading levels.

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