Education story.

Byline: Bina Shah

HAVE you ever thought about how telling your child a story is the first step towards lifelong literacy? Stories are narratives that we construct to understand the world around us; we tell our children stories to help them grow and learn; we pass on knowledge, history and culture on to future generations through stories. Storytellers and stories are teachers when we absorb what wisdom they offer.

It is clear that Pakistani children need more stories, embedded in a sound curriculum and a safe environment that gets children excited about learning. But how to get them to read more books, when schools seem unable to impart even the basics of reading and writing?

Alarmed by the 'current, failed method' of teaching Urdu which schoolchildren found burdensome and outdated, writer and publisher Musharraf Ali Farooqi developed the Unesco-approved Kahani se Kitab Tak programme to introduce Pakistani children to Urdu, ranging from folklore to classical literature, through a series of age-appropriate books for primary, middle school and high school students.

Primary school children study a picture book; middle school children get the same story in the form of a chapter book, and high school students read the original text, with annotations, learning proverbs, idioms and expressions of Urdu. Children learn vocabulary, then how to make their own stories, developing their own cognitive abilities. Their language skills grow hand in hand with a grasp of our local body of literature, which is rich and unique to our part of the world.

It is clear that Pakistani children need more stories.

Farooqi then created the StoryKit programme in 2015; he further developed the programme as a Harvard fellow in 2017. Story Kit sends storytellers into schools in underserved areas and brings the books into the children's lives in a direct manner, instilling a love of Urdu language and literature in schoolchildren. I was privileged to watch a StoryKit session at the Government Girls School in Gizri, PT Colony, where a storybook called Podna aur Podni was read aloud to 25 Class 6 students by Maham Zehra, who works with StoryKit. Through a spirited re-enactment of the story, getting the children to come to the front of the class and act out their own scenes, and lots of laughter, the girls heard a story, learned some vocabulary, and had fun together.

At the end of the session they each got a copy of the book kit, which included the book, a game, and a link to an...