Chapter 1 — Living Together

Chapter 1 of the Class 4 The World Around Us NCERT textbook (Our Wondrous World), "Living Together", introduces students to the idea of community as a space of togetherness and interdependence through the story of a boy named Chandan, his village, and the Van Mahotsav tree-planting festival. Students explore how people, places, and public spaces are connected, how communities cooperate to solve problems, and why caring for shared spaces matters. Download the PDF and read a summary and Q&A below.

• Community and Interdependence — The chapter introduces community through Chandan's village, where a playground, banyan tree, health centre, shops, roads, and police all serve the people who live there. Students observe how each person and place is connected to others — a shopkeeper sells daily goods, a road connects people, and a health centre provides treatment. Public places like parks and schools belong to everyone and need to be kept clean and safe.
• Van Mahotsav — Tree Planting Festival — Van Mahotsav is celebrated every year in India during the rainy season from 1 July to 7 July. In the story, Chandan's school friends, families, and neighbours come together to clean a park, repair benches, fix street lights, and plant saplings brought from a local nursery. The festival shows that caring for the environment is a shared community responsibility.
• Helping Hands and Working as a Team — Villagers contribute according to their own skills and resources — Sameer brings wood and nails to fix benches, Babita repairs a street light, and Noor brings saplings from her plant nursery. Groups are formed for cleaning, planting, watering, and cooking. A real-life example from Kanker, Chhattisgarh, shows a whole community building a bamboo-and-stone bridge over the Chinar river in just two days in 2024.
• Festivals, Food, and Community Bonds — After the Van Mahotsav plantation, the community shares a meal on banana leaves, with vegetables and cereals contributed by villagers. The used leaves are buried in a pit, which turns them into manure that improves soil quality. The chapter also mentions Uruka (the first day of Magh Bihu in Assam, 14 January) and the Khetala tradition in Sikkim, where community members come together at harvest time — showing that shared celebrations and cooperation exist across India.

1. 01Chapter 1 is titled 'Living Together' and is part of Unit 1 — Our Community in the Our Wondrous World textbook.
2. 02The chapter follows Chandan, a boy who lives in a village and shows readers how people and places in a community are connected.
3. 03Public places — parks, schools, health centres, roads, markets — are shared by everyone and kept up through community effort.
4. 04Van Mahotsav (Tree Planting Festival) is celebrated in India from 1 July to 7 July every year during the rainy season.
5. 05In the story, villagers with different occupations (mason, nursery owner, electrician) each contribute a skill to repair and beautify a park.
6. 06A real community in Kanker, Chhattisgarh, built a bamboo bridge over the Chinar river in two days in 2024 so students and villagers could cross during floods.
7. 07After the Van Mahotsav feast, banana leaves are buried in a pit; the chapter explains this turns into manure that improves soil quality.
8. 08The chapter introduces cultural practices like Uruka (Magh Bihu, Assam) and Khetala (harvest help in Sikkim) as examples of communities celebrating and working together across India.