yet again ... getting lost ... then enjoying self-discovery ...

    Books in the time of COVID   Anshumalika Rai and Nimesh Ved   This piece finds place in Teacher Plus’ February 2022 issue. Thanks are due to the team at Teacher Plus and colleagues for the questions (below) and more.   In the July 2020 issue of Teacher Plus we shared the initial steps of our journey of launching the Book Room. A few months after the launch COVID struck. In this article we talk about our experiences during the COVID times.     A colleague from a sister unit, during one of his visits, asked - as we discussed a book that had just arrived – to the students of which class will you give this book to read?   One of us responded thus - we do not tell the children which books to read, they decide . As we revisited the conversation, we realized that we had moved a few steps towards understanding children, books and the two together. This conversation had taken place after the students began coming regularly post - ...

  Book fairs and book stores as learning spaces Nimesh Ved and Anshumalika Rai Published at Deccan Herald. Thanks to the team there, to the book store teams that allowed us to put in time with books and to friends who accompanied us to the book fairs. Trips to book-stores and book-fairs during recent times have had us wonder why these are not looked at as learning spaces. Not as much as they warrant for sure. We have come across children and teachers at book-fairs but these appear more of exceptions given our numbers and the immense potential these spaces harbour. But first, what we do at these spaces. Let us begin with the book-fairs. The sheer numbers of books we see at the annual book-fair at Dilli we have not come across elsewhere. Images of people squatting on the floor, chatting excitedly about books and carrying bags full of books have stayed with us since. The smaller book-fairs, like those at the university campuses in Banaras, were different. Here we noticed ...

Navjeevan Singh and I share our experience at the Delhi Book Fair. A book (af)fair Some people felt the books with hands, some squat near corners and read, some read random pages and covers, some just flipped and glanced, some took the books closer to their noses, some looked up the books online to figure out more, some looked for books at wrong places, some sought books that weren’t there, some observed other people while some just drifted in and out of the stalls. We were at the Delhi Book Fair. People and more people  Books and more books There were those who had come with large bags having wheels while some had converted baby strollers to book carrying apparatuses. There were people who had come with friends and family, people who had come alone to put in time with books and people who had come to put in time with those they had come along with. Some had done their homework; they were armed with lists. The young appeared to outnumber the old. ...