A closer look at our India workbook...

Our India workbook is the first of our workbooks for be printed and sold. The longer workbooks give us an opportunity to dig deeper into the beautiful country of India, letting kids learn more about the culture, history, geography and nature of a magical place.

How does it work?

Kids receive the workbook in the mail, addressed to them.

The workbook consists of 18 different activities. Each activity provides an answer, a word which is filled in horizontally in the appropriate place. When all the activities for each section have been completed, it will reveal a word written vertically.

These words are written into the final answer page to reveal a questions, which kids have to answer to complete the workbook.

Types of activities

The workbook comes with all sorts of different activities, none of which are the same. Below you can read more detail for some of the activities.

Navigate the sacred rivers of India

Explanation: Kids need to count up all the different objects that can be found in the Ganges River. There’s a mixture of objects, including living animals, humans using the river for various activities and pieces of rubbish. Objects include:

Sadhus praying
Women washing clothes
Fish, both dead and alive
Ganges River Dolphins
Bits of rubbish, like plastic bags and drinks cans

Rationale: The Ganges is sacred to most Indians and plays a central part in many religious ceremonies. People submerge themselves in the waters, float candles and flowers on the river. Other people use the Ganges in every day life, for washing clothes, themselves and sometimes drinking and cooking water. There are plenty of animals in the Ganges, but lots of pollution as well. It’s important that kids recognize that the Ganges plays multiple roles in Indian culture - as a source of cultural and religious importance and as also as a source of continuing pollution which causes many problems in Indian society.

Match the language to the region exercise

Explanation: This activity involves matching different regional languages to the appropriate Indian state where the language is primarily spoken. At the end kids are asked which language is spoken in one specific state, which is the answer to the activity.

Rationale: Although Hindi and English are widely spoken in India, there are hundreds of other languages. Many people will speak their mother tongue, such as Marathi or Gujarati as well as Hindi. Deciding the ‘official’ language of India was complicated and contentious and there are still arguments about it. WE want to make sure children are aware of the diversity of India, which is reflected in its languages.

Activity pages

In between different sections in the workbook are Activity pages. These encourage kids to get up and move around, in a way related to the content they’re learning about.

Activities include:

Yoga poses
Simple cricket
Indian dancing in the form of mudras (hand positions)

Don’t worry, there are plenty of warnings about being careful with physical activities inside!

Replicate the Taj Mahal

There’s an insert as part of the workbook. Kids can cut out different pieces of the Taj Mahal and put them in the correct order in the book. One of the most noticeable things about the Taj Mahal is that its symmetrical, so kids must work to make their re-created version similarly symmetrical.