The Write Project

 In the summer of 2024, I had started a project on writing. It was a creative writing workshop for kids. I had always enjoyed writing and I wish when I was a child I had someone to guide me. I did not want someone to tell me what to write, but a slight nudge towards what to read, just a polish here and fixing there would have gone a long way.  That’s how the creative writing workshop idea came into being and I started it in my home, right in my living room with three different age groups of curious minds. 

There were three age groups:

6-7 year olds

8-9 year olds

10-11 year olds

It was a two hour workshop where I spoke about the structure of a story, how to develop a story arc, we did a couple of activities involving writing prompts, some group activities and at the end of the session each child had a completed story that they would be taking home to call their own. Within a span of a couple of hours they had created something out of scratch!

For the 6-7 year olds, we did a partner activity involving art, colors and story writing. The colors and art work allowed them to freely think and the stories that they came up with were uninhibited and wonderful. 

For the 8-9 year olds, we discussed their favorite authors and genres. For this group, we discussed the building blocks of creating a memorable character. Just like Lego bricks can build anything from a dragon to a truck, our imagination can give our characters wings to fly or fatal flaws. As a group we decided to create a superhero character and our little creators gave their very own superheroes amazing names and awesome super powers including but limited to “the ability to score a sixer in every ball”, “being able to live without sleeping”, “having an unlimited supply of ice cream” and “kindness”.

The last group of children were in the age group of children were 10-11 year olds and here we turned it up a notch. Children had to write a complete story following the story arc that we learnt about from few prompts given and the results were very impressive! The friends even took inspiration from each other to build out different parts of a story.

The experience of teaching and learning with young minds was something absolutely beautiful. The level of distractions that children have these days is something we could not even have imagined. We hear so much negative narrative about children having lost their ability to concentrate, really focus etc. etc - but I would strongly disagree with all of those because these kids were completely into in for two straight hours. they really applied themselves and came up with something. I guess crafting something you can call your own is a special feeling nothing else can replace. I hope I can come up with a more robust plan this summer. But the first batch will always be special.