Improve education for Nepali girls and minorities

Hot off the press: 1,500 copies of our first three children’s books, to supplement our teacher training programs that focus on the value of children’s literature as a literacy teaching tool and on strategies for incorporating books into the existing curriculum and school routines.

If you have been following our work for a while, you may recognize that this is an incredible accomplishment for us – the happily ever after ending of a long process, prolonged in various ways by the pandemic, that began nearly two years ago.

Research has demonstrated that listening to books being read aloud is one of the most important predictors or future academic success. Furthermore, having the chance to engage independently with books that are linguistically appropriate (in our case, printed in Nepali) and culturally relevant (to rural Nepal, using familiar local colloquialisms) is a cornerstone in the continuing development of functional literacy.

We decided to publish our own books because there is a lack of quality children’s books in Nepal. Now that we have been running training workshops for teachers for several years, we have begun to run out of quality books that we could stock on our classroom reading corners.

We’d like to give you a peek inside one of our books, Busy Bees, which was a collaboration among five teachers from two schools in Kavre district where we installed beehives in 2019, fulfilling a request from the local community.

The text describes the various chores of the worker bees and repeats a refrain of “Oh wow! That's the hardworking honeybee.”

Here are some sample stanzas from the book:

Roaming meadows and gardens, here they come buzzing
Oh wow! That's the hardworking honeybee.
Melting the wax, they build those hexagonal chambers
Oh wow! That's the hardworking honeybee
Flapping their wings, they fix the temperature of the hive
Oh wow! That's the hardworking honeybee
Searching for honey in the garden, they help pollinate many different plants
Oh wow! That's the hardworking honeybee

The illustrations are warm and engaging, with a bit of an anthropomorphic touch (bees using brooms to clean the hives), which students will find amusing. The phrasing relies on local (meaning more rural) word choice, to suggest activities of the bees. The book is also informative; it could be used in the classroom as a curriculum on honey bees.

Thank you for supporting our publishing efforts and the rural communities where we work. Your donation helps us publish and distribute our books as well as educate teachers about how to use them in the classroom. You make it all possible. We are extremely grateful!