Bela, Bishu and Banku Bhaiya: how the new NCERT Class 3 textbook teaches family — and what to do at home

If you went to an Indian school in the 1990s, your Class 3 EVS textbook probably opened with a definition. “A family is a group of people who live together and love each other.” You memorised it. You wrote it on the test. You forgot it.

The new NCERT Class 3 textbook Our Wondrous World — used for the “World Around Us” subject across CBSE schools from 2025 onwards — does something different. It opens with a child named Bela.

“Namaste! I have two brothers — Banku Bhaiya and little Bishu. My Dadiji makes hot pakodas when it rains, and my Dadaji teaches us games he played when he was our age.”

There is no definition. There is a child your child can imagine, in a home your child has been to (or one very like it), with a Dadiji and a Dadaji and pakodas in the rain. By the time the chapter ends, your child has not learned what a family is — they have built the idea, by walking through Bela’s home and thinking about their own.

This is a quiet but enormous shift in how Indian primary education works. It is worth a conversation at home.

What the chapter actually teaches

The first chapter of Our Wondrous World is called “Family and Friends.” It covers four big ideas:

1. What makes up a family — parents, grandparents, siblings, and the kinship words a child needs (Dadiji, Dadaji, Nanaji, Naniji, Mausi, Mama, Bua, Chacha).
2. Different kinds of families — joint families, nuclear families, single-parent families, families of two. The textbook is explicit: all are equally families.
3. How family members help each other — Dadiji oiling Bela’s hair, Banku Bhaiya chopping vegetables, Bela helping Dadaji in the garden. No one person carries the whole load.
4. The wider circle — Bela’s pet dog Shiru (“a member of our family”), Munni and Kusum Mausi from next door, neighbours who feel like family. Family is not only blood.

Notice what is missing. There is no list to memorise. There is no “fill in the blanks.” The chapter is built around scenes from Bela’s home, and at every scene the textbook asks your child a question — not a fact-recall question, a thinking question.

For example, after telling your child that Bela helps Dadaji in the garden while Dadiji oils her hair and Banku Bhaiya cooks, the textbook asks: “Why do you think every single person in Bela’s home does some work, instead of just one person doing everything?”

That is a different kind of question. There is no single right answer. Your child has to think about fairness, tiredness, love, contribution. They might say “because then everything gets done” or “because Dadiji would be too tired” or “because helping is a way to show love.” All three are good. All three teach something a definition cannot.

Why story-first beats definition-first

Two reasons, both well established in education research:

Children remember scenes, not sentences. A six-year study from the University of Melbourne showed that primary-age children retain narrative-anchored facts roughly four times longer than the same facts presented as bullet points. A Dadiji making pakodas in the rain is a scene; “grandparents are family members” is a sentence. The scene wins, every time.

Concepts learned from a single example travel poorly. If your child learns the idea of “family” only through their own home, they may quietly believe that families that look different from theirs are somehow lesser. The textbook deliberately shows Bela’s joint family, then a single mother with one child, then a household with a beloved pet, then neighbours who behave like family — so the concept of family in your child’s head is wide enough to hold the actual world.

This second point matters in modern India. Class 3 children today live in homes that look more different from each other than any previous generation in Indian history. The textbook is — gently, without making a fuss — preparing your child to be kind to all of them.

What to do at home (this week)

The chapter is short. It will be done in school in about ten days. You have a window. Three things that work:

Walk through your own home like Bela walks through hers. Sit with your child after dinner and ask: “Who is in our family? What does each person do? Who would you forget if you weren’t paying attention?” The last question is the interesting one — it surfaces the people whose contribution is invisible. (Often a grandparent. Often the help. Often a parent.)

Ask the kinship words. Most urban Class 3 children today can name “mummy, papa, dadi, dada” but go blank on Mausi vs Bua, Mama vs Chacha. Spend five minutes drawing a small family tree. Your child will notice that Hindi (and most Indian languages) has more precise family words than English does, which is a small but real source of pride and curiosity.

Visit a different kind of family. A friend’s home where the family looks different from yours — fewer people, more people, a single parent, a multigenerational joint family. Don’t make a lesson of it. Just go. Your child will absorb without being told.

Talk about Shiru, or your equivalent. Bela calls her dog “a member of the family.” If you have a pet, ask your child what makes them family. If you don’t, ask whether they think a pet can be family. Both conversations open up empathy.

A note for parents whose children are not in CBSE

The “World Around Us” subject in Our Wondrous World is the new NCERT primary curriculum. ICSE and state-board children typically have their own EVS textbook with a parallel chapter — almost always the first chapter of the year. The pedagogy varies, but the topic is universal in Indian Class 3 syllabi: every child this age, in every board, is being introduced to the idea of family.

What changes between boards is how it is taught. A parent’s job is the same in all of them: take whatever the textbook starts, and finish it at the dining table.

Why we built Dhee around chapters like this

The Class 3 World Around Us chapter on family is one of around 60 chapters Dhee tutors children through across the primary years. Every Dhee session for this chapter starts the way the textbook does — with Bela’s home — and asks the kind of questions the textbook asks: what makes a family, why does everyone help, can a dog be family. Your child speaks (or types) their answer. Dhee listens for the kind of answer — a memorised one, or a real, thought-through one — and probes deeper or moves on.

Fifteen minutes a day. The same chapter your child is doing in school, taught the way the new NCERT textbook intends it to be taught: through scenes, through questions, through your child’s own thinking. We did not invent this approach. The textbook did. We just built the tool that makes sure no child sits through the chapter without ever being asked the questions in it.

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Want to see what a Dhee session for Class 3 World Around Us actually looks like? Try Dhee with your child, or read more about how it works.