The year 2022 was all about flexibility. Conducting online sessions from cafés and hotel rooms.Finishing an online session before boarding a bus to do an in-person session in another city. Adjusting schedules.Cancelling some editions of my book club because children were - finally - travelling.Competing with swimming and cricket coaching and all the other things that weren't factors I needed to consider at all in 2020-21. And it's been quite a journey. We did so much; I met so many people; I travelled extensively for work. I can't help wondering what 2023 is going to be like! Book Clubs Book Club Reads 2022 (ages 9 and 10) I launched my first book club in December 2020, and look how far we've come! Yes, we read ALL these books in 2022. I read 14 with ages nine and ten, and 18 with ages seven and eight.Yes, there were … [Read more...]
Letter-Writing at the Writers’ Club
I've been waiting to do this activity ever since I thought of it, and it was well worth the wait -- particularly because two children said this was the best Writers' Club session ever!Receiving a letter is lovely. I enjoy every part of it - the anticipation, seeing something in the postbox, seeing that it is addressed to me, opening it and reading it. That's why I decided to bring that to the Writers' Club. I asked each of the girls to bring an envelope to class; I brought the rest.For me, the first and biggest surprise was that children don't know how to address an envelope! My instructions were poor - simply because I didn't realise how clueless they would be. Many children wrote the address at the back of the envelope. Several others wrote their names in big bold letters and then somehow squeezed the address in below. Many didn't know that a stamp would normally be stuck at … [Read more...]
Catching Up – Workshops
It's always fun to do workshops when I don't have to organise them! Last week, I conducted a fun workshop at The King's School in Goa. We worked with critical thinking - something that is close to my heart also because I taught Theory of Knowledge and enjoyed it so much.Lots of people ask me what a critical thinking workshop involves. For me, it involves understanding our prejudices and assumptions. Of course we need to make assumptions all the time. But perhaps we could look at the ways in which we jump to conclusions, what fallacies creep in, and how everything we know and think is shaped by more factors than we can count.An interesting assumption that cropped up during this workshop, for instance, was that almost everyone in the room assumed the store owner in a tiny written exercise we discussed was male!I'm travelling to Chandrapur and Akola next week to do some … [Read more...]
Bhusawal
About three years ago, I began working on an exciting project with the National Rail Museum in New Delhi. The idea was to create stories set in and around trains in India. It was challenging but fun. I dived into details of engines and their working in a way that I had never done before. Among other things, I needed to ensure that the story led naturally to the technical pages, while also being independent of them. In other words, a reader who was completely uninterested in technical details could still enjoy the story and cheerfully skip the technical pages.So, I launched into intensive research. What trains could I write about? What would my characters do? How would they go on an adventure while also discovering how an electric locomotive works?I set the first of the stories on the Duronto, a train with which I am very familiar. Among other things this is what I kept in my … [Read more...]