Tuesday December 14

Eight Year Old’s Short Story Wins $5000 Library of Books for Small South Auckland School

Kayla Shaw (8) from Puni School, a small country school of 200 pupils in South Auckland, has recently won the Baci Short Story competition for 2015.

Kayla’s story was selected from hundreds of entries from Auckland’s low decile schools and she will receive an iPad and the school received a $5000 library of books.

The Baci Short Story competition is the passion of Dr Sharad Paul and aimed at encouraging creativity in students 11 and under from low decile schools. The eligible schools are Decile 1 to 5.

The competition encourages the children to have fun with their imagination and creativity that will contribute to ongoing growing literacy. In Auckland alone there are 99 decile 1-3 schools.

The theme for the story this year was “You turned the key in the lock and opened the door. To your horror, you saw…..”.

“Kayla’s imagination certainly lived up to that challenge with deranged headless Barbie dolls, creepy rooms and lots of smashing and crashing,” said Dr Sharad Paul founder of the Baci Trust.

“One of our teachers entered the students from her year 3 and 4 class into the competition as an opportunity to not only share their wonderful narrative work, but grasp the concept that when we write we need to think of our audience developing ideas and imagery that will involve them” said the Headmaster of Puni School Haydon Brill.

“ It is great for our school to have this acknowledgement and we are so proud of Kayla.”

Sponsored by Dr Sharad Paul’s Baci Trust, the competition has evolved from his belief that by encouraging creativity and art - academic performance is improved.

For almost 10 years, at the invitation of the schools, Dr Sharad has been visiting low decile schools in Auckland on a Monday to talk to the students and do some creative writing with them.

“ What started me off on this personal mission is I know creativity improves literacy and numeracy and many of these low-decile school pupils were reading books three years behind their higher-decile peers,” continued Dr Paul.

“There is plenty of research that teaching creativity and story-telling improves school culture and also student outcomes.”

Because of his work with literacy in low decile schools, Dr Paul served seven years from 2006 on the New Zealand National Commission of UNESCO as literacy advisor.

Dr Paul’s Baci Trust funds the competition and all his literacy projects.

BACKGROUND ON DR SHARAD PAUL

In 2006 Dr Paul started a bookstore Baci Lounge and it is then he began this short story annual competition for low-decile schools. Because of his international and local commitments he no longer has the store but is still committed to spending one day a week with schools.

Dr Shard studied medicine and also law, and has a varied work life as a writer and university (skin cancer) academic. He works globally as well as running a Skin Cancer clinic in Auckland. He is also a widely published author and is one of the few writers to have been published internationally in literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry and medical textbooks.

Literacy and encouraging literacy is his passion

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