Read@Home Print Pack
Read@Home Print Pack
Embedded Files
Category: Editorial & Print Design
Client: Pratham Books' StoryWeaver, in partnership with SCERT Maharashtra & UNICEF
My role: Layout Design (worksheets + cover)
Context
The problem: School closures cutting off Grades 1–2 children from regular learning, especially in remote areas with limited screen access.
The response: A print pack combining storybooks + worksheets, distributed in Gadchiroli and Nandurbar, remote districts of Maharashtra.
Why this mattered: Foundational literacy needed a physical, standalone solution.
On International Literacy Day, Pratham Books' StoryWeaver, in partnership with SCERT Maharashtra and UNICEF, launched a set of foundational literacy programmes for children in remote parts of Maharashtra. After 17 months of school closures had left many children without regular access to online classes, the Read@Home print pack was created for grades 1 and 2 combining storybooks, worksheets, and supplementary materials, distributed to 25,000 children in the remote districts of Gadchiroli and Nandurbar, alongside training for over 1,000 teachers to support the intervention.
Design Challenge
The core constraint that shaped my decisions: The pack needed to work as a self-contained learning experience, clear enough to guide a child through independently, resilient enough to work well whether a teacher, field-worker, or parent was there to walk through it page by page.
What the project demanded from the layout: Clean, uncluttered spreads with generous space, where the purpose of each activity was visually clear on its own, and ample space for the text instructions.
The balance I had to strike: The worksheets were built to align with NIPUN Bharat's foundational literacy guidelines, and the design direction moved from an initial colourful, playful instinct toward something more restrained. The priority was keeping focus squarely on the study material, with minimal colour and no visual noise pulling attention away from the content. That meant finding warmth within restraint: a workbook that stayed to-the-point and functional, yet had enough space to play around within its structure. The encouragement came through in spacing, pacing, and how instructions were phrased, rather than just in decoration.
Early Concept Layouts
Final Page Layouts
Design Decisions
Emoji-Responses: The initial instinct was to keep them colourful, filled-in yellow smileys that children would simply mark or circle to indicate a response. Instead, the faces were kept in outline form, black and white, giving children the option to colour them in themselves as part of completing the activity.
This small shift aimed two things — it kept the page visually restrained and in line with the overall "study material first" direction, while turning a passive marking task into a small moment of active participation. Colouring the face they identified with made the response feel more personally theirs, rather than just a tick on a page.
Response faces kept in outline, left for children to colour in, turning a simple marker into a small moment of participation.
Type size and legibility: Font sizes were kept larger than a typical workbook, with generous line spacing, to match where early readers in grades 1 and 2 actually are in their reading journey.
Choice of spot illustrations: Spot illustrations for the worksheets were chosen with a lot of care, always after thorough discussion with the educators and researchers. Each illustration needed to work on multiple levels at once — closely aligned with the written material, easy for a child to locate within the storybook itself, and clear enough to stand alone, so that the exercise it supported remained legible even without flipping back to the source page.
Pacing across the pack: Rather than filling every page with content, more room was left between answers, and whole pages were left blank for sketching and colouring activities.
This gave the pack a natural rhythm. The pauses built in-between structured activities created space for a child's own creative expression within the workbook.
Impact
Read@Home reached children in grades 1 and 2 across the remote districts of Gadchiroli and Nandurbar — regions where terrain and limited connectivity had left many without access to any learning during school closures. The pack was distributed to 25,000 children, alongside a capacity-building effort that trained over 1,000 teachers to support the intervention both at home and in classrooms.
Beyond distribution, the programme's worksheets were built to align with NIPUN Bharat's national foundational literacy guidelines — placing the pack within a larger effort to strengthen early reading outcomes across the state. An endline assessment of the broader programme showed emergent language skills among children rising significantly from baseline, reinforcing that the pack's simplicity and clarity weren't just design choices, but ones grounded in measurable learning impact.
Reflection
Working closely with educators and researchers on this project was a significant learning experience. It sharpened my understanding of what mattered most pedagogically, and taught me when to set decorative instinct aside and let intent carry the design.
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