The Mad Terminator – A Story by the Children from Grace Support Shelter

Recently we received a mail from Tulika Bathija,a research scholar at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She told us that as part of her data collection for the thesis, she had conducted a creative writing workshop and the children she was working with created a shared writing fiction book titled ‘The Mad Terminator’.

Background to the workshop

This collaborative fiction endeavor is a part of a narrative writing workshop conducted for children between age group of 7-12 years. This workshop was organized as part of my Mphil thesis which aims at studying linguistic and cognitive maturity in children’s narrative writing. As part of this workshop children worked on their mechanics, punctuation, descriptive writing, dialogue writing and how to create a plot structure. The workshop sessions began with story-telling from different childrens’s story books to make them aware of features of narrative writing. The workshop was aimed at creating awareness about narrative elements and make children overcome the blocks of punctuations, ideas, sentence structures and other grammatical features to create a collaborative story together.

This collaborative fiction was done in stages from character creation, naming, creating the plot, the problem, solution in the story, designing the illustrations, editing and finally creating the blurb and the cover page.

These children are from a Home school in Alwal, Hyderabad called Grace Support Shelter which looks after children from estranged families and provides free education to children helping them accommodate in the main stream schools once they are ready to leave their interim home school. I worked with 17 children for this workshop since I was looking at a restricted age group. The children need linguistic help but have shown great enthusiasm in creating this story which is completely their brain child from its inception. The kids were excited and enjoyed the experience.

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