BEYONDBOARDROOMS

Catching them young

Kids Read programme by British Council and HSBC Bank Oman seeks to change the perception of children, teachers and parents about reading and storytelling, offering an incredible opportunity to improve childrens listening and communication skills, writes Muhammed Nae

an incredible opportunity to enable children to communicate and express themselves. It is such a simple idea that you can select a number of books and with the help of the HSBC you will be able to reach them to so many schools in the region, says Graal who also visited Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE and Saudi Arabia as part of the programme. This partnership makes an amazing amount of work possible and it is actually changing the perception of children and teachers about stories here in Oman and all over the gulf region. Hundreds and hundreds of schools are being inuenced by this programme. The partnership of the Ministry of Education in Oman really puts a seal of approval on this programme. He feels that the most important thing about story telling is that it makes the bond between the children and the grown-up- including the parents and teachers- strong. Asked about how technology rendering irrelevant the traditional way of storytelling of which Graal is a strong advocate, the master storyteller replies by narrating another story, This is the story about a small village where the story teller used to tell stories by a re and one day they brought television to the village, pushing all the children to watch the TV. But after a while, they went back to the story teller; and the people asked why they go back to the storyteller while they can watch so many stories on the television. The children replied, but the storyteller knows us and we can talk to the storyteller. May be in the future the new technology will nd a way to interact with the children where children can change the story ending, in the way they interact with me when I tell stories. He says in the future books and technology can work together to present the stories in more interactive ways. Talal Al Balushi and Satyan Jesrani from HSBC Bank Oman who volunteered to hold storytelling sessions for kids across Oman said they were elated by the enthusiastic response they received from children.

halil Gibran once said that childrens soul dwelled in the house of tomorrow which we could not visit, even in our dreams. Since their language is as primitive and pristine as the nature, in order to communicate with them we need to shed all the stylistic ourishes of our polished tongues. They communicate in the universal language of colours, images and music and therefore we grown-ups cannot converse with them straightaway in our sophisticated lingua franca. The more pictures and sounds we employ and the lesser words we use, the better can we get our message across to them. Kevin Graal, who extensively travelled in the Middle East and Europe and interacted with children as part of Kids Read programme by British Council and HSBC Bank Middle East, feels that children everywhere in the world are incredibly similar. Children here in Oman and elsewhere react in almost

exactly the same way as children in the UK, he says. They laugh for the same thing and cry for the same; and we very often tell them the same story about the same thing. A programme like Kids Read brings us together; it makes the world a little smaller and makes us feel that our differences are not as great as our similarities. A storyteller and educator with an extensive repertoire of traditional stories, riddles, songs and games from around the world, Graal recently visited Muscat to attend various story reading sessions, workshops, interactive sessions with children and teachers and storytelling volunteers from HSBC. With a unique and effective blend of games, music, pictures, mental games, songs, coupled with his dynamic and electrifying body language, Graal steals to the heart of children everywhere in the world. The Kids Read programme offers

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March 2013