A grandfather and his young grandson sitting together on a couch, reading and telling a story.

Guru Nanak Jayanti Is Coming: Why the Sakhis Your Family Tells Count as Real Reading Time

Reading Habits·October 23, 2026·2 min read·0–3 yrs3–5 yrs6–8 yrs9–12 yrs

Guru Nanak Jayanti falls on November 24 this year — the Gurpurab marking Guru Nanak's birth, usually spent at the gurdwara, over langar, and in a lot of homes, with grandparents telling children the sakhis: the stories of Guru Nanak's life and teachings. If your child spends that evening listening rather than reading, it's fair to wonder whether it "counts" the same way story time usually does, especially mid-festival-week when the regular reading box is the last thing on anyone's mind.

It counts. The National Early Literacy Panel's 2008 research synthesis found oral language — following a story, holding its people and events in mind, putting your own thoughts into words back — to be one of the strongest things that predicts how well a child goes on to read. That panel wasn't studying sakhis specifically, and nobody's claiming oral storytelling and books are interchangeable. But that's exactly what's happening when a grandparent tells a child about young Nanak giving away the family's money to feed hungry travellers, and the child asks why, and what happened next.

If anything, a told story often gets more of that back-and-forth than a solo picture-book read does — a grandparent elaborating, a sibling arguing about what they'd have done differently. That interactive, question-and-answer quality is the part research keeps circling back to as genuinely good for language growth, whether the "book" is paper or a grandparent's memory.

So let the sakhi be the evening's reading, full stop — it doesn't need a book afterward to make it official. If you want to ask your child to retell it back to you the next day, that's where a lot of the real comprehension work happens anyway. And if you'd like a book alongside it at some point, an illustrated life of Guru Nanak or a collection of sakhis for children gives the same stories a second, visual form without competing with the version your family already tells best.