Do you ask your children what they’re thinking about?

Children have the ability to find magical solutions to the problems that trouble them, writes Rym Ghazal.

Art has an ability to engage children.

A group of children have come up with a solution to end crisis in the world: turn evil people into carrots and then eat them.

I had the great fortune last week to be invited by the Fatima Bint Hazza Cultural Foundation to run a workshop at Abu Dhabi Art on imagination, reading and writing for children.

One of the ways I got everyone to relax was to role-play. I happened to have lots of bunny ears and a few deer ears with me – and the girls all wanted to be bunnies and the boys wanted to be deer.

The girls decided they were “magical bunnies” and the boys were “super deer”, all blessed with special powers to save the world, travel through time and see through barriers.

Besides zapping bad people into carrots, their powers also included creating shields around babies and animals and even protecting nature and farms. I was truly impressed by their passion and practicality.

The superheroes also mentioned that each day, before they saved the world, they must have a “big yummy” breakfast.

“A superhero must have energy to save the world,” one girl commented. Waffles, pancakes, fruits, cereal, hot chocolate, tea, eggs and some “green stuff” all sprinkled with magical dust.

Workshops like these are important to find out what children are thinking about.

They allow you to tap into their imagination and understand what they want. The foundation has designed e-books to get kids to read more. These are interactive on an iPad and are published in both Arabic and English.

And true enough, the minute I pulled out an iPad and called up one of the stories, all the kids started to press everything on the screen to watch the characters move as a voice read out the lines.

When I was a child, it was enough to hold a book and look at the drawings and let our imagination do the rest. But today’s kids may need a bit more help.

As for Arabic stories, it is all about how they are read and what words are chosen. It is an art and a skill that few people practise today.

Earlier this week I was sitting with my neighbour’s kids reading them a story and they all reacted with a big “NO!” when I suggested an Arabic book.

“Boring!” one of them said. Another said: “Arabic is homework”, while a third said something along the lines of how it is difficult and that only when he gets into trouble will his mother start talking to him in Arabic so that people around them don’t understand. “But people do understand, you know. From the tone,” he said.

So I decided to use an e-book about a Bedouin knight who set out to do courageous things. It triggered an engaging discussion. When I asked them what courage was, they gave me interesting answers.

One 11-year-old said: “Courage is the ability to speak your mind, and to speak the truth, without fear from those around you.

“Like when I threw my brother’s shoes out the window, I should have had courage to say I did it. But instead, I said he did it when our parents asked.”

You learn a lot when you listen to young people. Sometimes we get too caught up with what “should be done and said” and what a child should learn and do, that we don’t actually ask what they want and why they feel this or that way about something.

For instance, when some said “boring” to an Arabic fairytale book. When I dug a bit deeper, I found out it wasn’t really boredom but “discomfort”.

They didn’t understand some of the words, and instead of asking what they meant, they just shut the whole book out so as not to feel stress.

In some ways, we all fear things we don’t understand, and so open communication without judgement is one of the ways to overcome this fear, build bridges and open up new sources of inspiration.

Twitter:@arabianmau