9 May 2016

Stories And Punctuation, An Unusual Author Visit by Ms. Belinda Paul , Form Tutor 4A

The students of Form 4 attended a work shop on Thursday which was conducted by the author Natasha Sharma. She is an award winning children’s books author and has published twelve books for children so far including Bonkers! That won the SCBWI Crystal Kite Award 2014 for Asia and Middle East.

Natasha Sharma introduced her book “Squiggle Gets Stuck” and skillfully took the students through an exciting adventure with her beloved “Squiggle”. She briefly introduced Squiggle who is first seen in “Squiggle takes a walk- all about punctuation, where squiggle-curious, confused and determined to tell a comma from an apostrophe. She smoothly introduced her second book ‘Squiggle Gets Stuck” all about a fun- filled adventure where Squiggle has fallen into a dictionary and can’t escape. The only way out is to create a grammatically correct sentence and use it to jump off the page. She’s even got to rescue a very mixed-up character called Doodle Dude while helping him learn about verbs, nouns, prepositions and more, that turns muddled sentences into one that makes sense.  An hour session no doubt
kept the students in splits, but took them through a journey of sentence construction (parts of speech) which had never been so much fun before bringing these characters to life.
Her reading and her delightful way with words while writing, while reading it out to students with complete expression, her voice modulation got the students very excited and they geared up collectively to cook up a funny story as she steered their ideas through witty , open ended tips and questions.

This session encouraged the students to construct meaningful sentences and bring their creative pieces alive! What a fantastic learning opportunity this was for the 4th graders.