Do your find your kids often grabbing a pen and pencil and jotting down ideas? Do they fabricate small incidents of the day into a short story? if you are nodding along- congratulations you are raising a young writer!
In today's world, to get kids to fall in love with the art of reading and writing is in itself an ordeal for parents. There are a lot of opportunities to get them to start reading and writing but there are equally many distractions that keep them away.
Over the last 17-18 months, our kids have got a chance to stay indoors for the largest possible time and this has helped cultivate a breed of young readers and writers- and for that, as a parent, I am thankful for the pandemic!
My 8-year-old who is an independent reader takes on to writing and I often see the whiff of her recent reads in the storylines she pens down. She smiles innocently nodding that she did "borrow" the theme from there but with the characters and setting of the story changed. I smile and give her a nodding look. But when that transcends into another story- adapted by another book she read, the worried parent in me pops out and I start telling what to do, what not to do, how to write, how to tweak the storyline and all of that.
That IS the mistake, author Paro Anand tells parents not to do, when raising budding writers!
In an exclusive conversation with her, famous children's book author and award-winning literary veteran Paro Anand spoke to us on what it takes to inspire our children to write more, how to give them small writing prompts, and how we can help them be better writers by being better readers as a family.
In this short writing workshop for kids, Paro also spoke about her recent book "Unmasked" which talks about 18 different short stories for young readers (aged 10+) on life during the pandemic. Watch this full interview to know more about how to get your kids to write better, what inspired Paro to write this book and a fun contest to win an exclusively signed copy of the Unmasked- know how you can get it for your kids!
KSP Team
Mansi Zaveri
Parul Gupta
