Vandana

Teach your little one the timeless prayers of the Hindu tradition - one line at a time.

These are the prayers our parents and grandparents chanted at dawn and dusk, at the temple, on every special occasion. Vandana is a gift of this heritage to your child, so they grow up with the same sacred words passed on for centuries.

Inside are 20 beloved Sanskrit prayers - Guru Vandana, the Gayatri Mantra, prayers to Ganesha, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Vishnu, Suryadev, Hanuman, and more. Each chapter starts with Sanskrit verses in Devanagari, an English transliteration, a child-friendly pronunciation guide and a simple meaning of the verses. Soft colored-pencil illustrations of the deities with vivid depiction of their features are included to hold a small child's gaze and fill them with wonder and imagination.

But here is the quieter gift. Every verse memorized exercises the muscle of attention - memory, focus, patience, perseverance, and attention to detail - the very skills that set a child up for success in everything they do, throughout life. Long after the prayer is learned, the discipline stays. Your child thinks they are learning prayers. They are learning how to learn.

Created by a parent and dedicated to the grandmother at whose side he first learned these words, Vandana is for bedtimes, for mornings, for festivals - for every moment you want your child to feel rooted in something timeless, and to grow into someone capable of anything.