The Chhat Club — The Box on the Roof | Picture Book for Ages 6–10

A story, and then a method

Four children meet on a terrace. One of them has a question she has been carrying around all morning, and nowhere to put it. So they cut a slot in an old tin.

The story is about 400 words — short enough to actually finish at bedtime, and carried by the pictures, so a six-year-old can follow it before they can read it.

The four steps at the back

When the story ends, the book does not. At the back there are four steps for what to do with a question: write it down · decide if it is a small one or a big one · work out who or what could answer it · go and find out.

The steps are built on the Question Formulation Technique — Right Question Institute, published by Harvard Education Press, and used in over a million classrooms.

Why a question box

• Children stop asking. They go from around a hundred questions a day before school to almost none by middle school — and children as young as seven hold back because they worry classmates will think them stupid.
• "I don't know" stops being frightening. A grown-up says it on page 16 and is not embarrassed by it. Most children have never seen that.
• Curiosity is one of the strongest known predictors of how a child does at school (von Stumm, Hell & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2011).
• It ends in something the child makes — so the book keeps working after it is finished.

How to use it

• Read it together. Ten minutes.
• Turn to the back. Four steps, in order.
• Make the box. Any tin, any box. The slot does not have to be straight.
• Leave it somewhere. Questions go in during the week. Open it together on a Sunday.
• Use the dinner-table pages when nobody knows what to talk about.

What this book is not

• It is not a workbook.
• There is no moral at the end.
• No grown-up hands over the answer.
• Nobody is punished for being wrong.

The children work it out badly, in the wrong order, and get there anyway.

Delivery

Delivered across India. Cash on delivery is available, and online payment carries a discount.

Printing in progress. Dispatches in 4 to 6 weeks. You will get an email the day it ships.