Paati Goes Viral by Prabhu Vishwanathan is such a sweet book! At my reading programme, I like to begin with a short book because it gives us the time to get to know one another and warm up. Also, when the book is short, we have more time for activities!
Dhruv’s grandparents are excited about travelling, but the best laid plans often go awry. When Thatha dies in his sleep, Paati no longer has the will to keep doing everything that makes her happy. Her family coaxes her into travelling alone, and everything goes well until Paati loses her camera. A camera that belonged to Thatha. It’s social media to the rescue as the world comes together to recreate Paati’s memories of her solo tour in this heartwarming book about helping one another.
Here’s what we’ll do as we read the book together!
Viral
What do you think the word means? Do you think it is a positive word or a negative word?
Language is fascinating, and one of the reasons I love English is the way it keeps growing to stay alive. A word or phrase that doesn’t exist suddenly becomes so common that we have to stop and think to remember a time when we didn’t know what it meant. Together, we’ll explore words, acronyms and phrases that have been made up quite recently. Finally, we’ll make up words of our own to use during the course of the programme!
My City
Taking advantage of the fact that my book club meets online, I will ask the children to tell me about their cities. What do they like and dislike about the city in which they live? How much do they think they know about their city?
Finally, I would love for each of them to write a short paragraph on why the others should – or should not – visit their hometowns. Let’s see how this goes!
Travel Writing
The most natural creative writing component to introduce through this book is travel writing. Working with travel writing at the October edition of my writing programmes was fun, which encourages me to repeat simpler versions of the activities here at my book club.
I would love for the children to put pictures and words together to tell me about a place they visited. Through this activity, I will introduce a few technical elements of travel writing, including persuasive language, rhetorical questions and structure.
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