Earrings for Reading: Podcasts of Iranian Children’s National Library

Earrings for Reading: Podcasts of Iranian Children’s National Library

The podcasts of Iranian Children’s National Library (http//icnl.nlai.ir) are collections of audios introducing books in an attractive manner and providing an archive of the voices of the writers, translators and other individuals related to the children literature. As these podcasts are available in the web, there is a great opportunity for communicating with mother tongue and cultural roots. Persian children living in other countries can enjoy these podcasts because they may just verbally familiar with this language and they are not literate for reading and writing in Persian. The idea of the project was found at the beginning of 2016. At first, we made two pilot episodes and waited for the feedbacks. It was acceptable, so we began the work as an executive plan. Just one author and one translator accompanied with us to read the books with their own voices in the first episode. Other texts were read aloud by the librarians who were involved in the project. In some cases, the children’s voices were also used, but from the sixth episode, all the texts were recorded by the voices of the writers and translators. In 7th episode a professional storyteller joined the project for a book whose author was not alive. At the end of 8th episode, 20 authors and translators contributed the project with their own voices. Each episode is about 40 minutes and deals with a specific subject. Selected texts from related books in a designed scenario were read aloud for recording. Then related songs from children music albums were used between the parts. Also in some cases the movies based on the books or related to the topic were introduced. The published subjects are about freedom and independence, peace, trees and environmental protection, Nowruz (Iranian’s New Year) and spring, summer vacation, traveling, winter and Yalda Night and International Children’s Day. In this poster graphic design of each episode illustrated and a brief description of the whole project added. There were some earrings in little pockets designed by the theme of the podcasts and QR Code for listening them through the smart phones.