Culture & Education | Saturday 7 October, 2017 2:51 am |

Kalimat Publishing, a Sharjah-based publishing house specialized in Arabic children’s books, has held a creative workshop to help parents write stories to read to their children.

 

With the title ‘A Story of Your Imagination – Becoming Your Children’s World’, the workshop was organised by training experts Sxill in collaboration with Kalimat. Twenty participants, mostly mothers interested in writing, were trained by writers from Kalimat on how to hone their creative ideas and transform them into a flowing storyline.

 

They were introduced to various narrative techniques to build the plots and characters, and shown the most effective methods of creating natural dialogue, combining interesting events, rich language, simplicity and organic developments.

 

Kalimat writers Dr. Reem Al Gerg, Sahar Naji Mahfouz and Samia Ayesh spoke about their experience and highlighted the importance of defining age groups when writing stories for children. They also stressed that writers should always choose topics that match the children’s understanding and knowledge as well as their ability to comprehend vocabulary.

 

Commenting on the workshop, Tamer Said, Managing Director of Kalimat Group, said: “The workshop aimed to educate women and mothers on the successful techniques of creative writing to enable them to write good children’s stories. A key objective for Kalimat is to create children’s stories that help to foster the relationships and develop the communication between kids and their parents, which will have a positive impact on youngsters and reinforce a loving and nurturing environment.

 

“The workshop contributed to enhancing the skills of the participants and developing their linguistic knowledge through new techniques. It also helped parents to increase their confidence and self-esteem in terms of their story writing, empowering them – in the long term – to improve their creative writing skills and write stories that will be published and distributed, ultimately enriching Arab children’s libraries,” he added.

 

Since it was founded, Kalimat Group participated in 50 international book fairs worldwide, and distributed its books in more than 16 countries and 3,000 schools. The group prides itself in publishing the highest-quality books, 30 of which have won prestigious Arab and international awards. Since its inception, Kalimat Group has collaborated with more than 70 authors and 100 illustrators from around the world and translated more than 42 Arabic books into foreign languages. So far, Kalimat Group has published more than 300 Arabic titles.