Last winter, I used my imagination to rescue a disastrous birthday party for my six-year-old nephew, Bilal, in Islamabad. I'm a primary school teacher, so the family assumes I can entertain children, but this was a challenge even for me.
The plan had been to take twelve children to an indoor play centre, but on the morning of the party, the centre phoned to say they'd had a burst pipe and had to close. We had two hours, a small flat, a lot of cake and twelve very excited six-year-olds on their way.
So I invented a game on the spot. I told the children that the flat had been turned into a pirate ship and that a sea monster had hidden treasure somewhere on board. I made treasure maps by drawing on brown paper bags, and turned the sofa into the ship's deck, the kitchen into a desert island and the bathroom into the monster's cave. I wrote clues in rhyme, and hid sweets in socks, cupboards and shoes. My sister played the sea monster, wearing a green bedsheet, and growled from the bathroom. The children had to solve each clue to find the next one.
I felt incredibly proud of how it turned out. The children were so absorbed that nobody asked about the play centre, and several parents asked me afterwards where we'd bought the game. Bilal said it was the best birthday ever, which, for an uncle, is the highest praise possible. It reminded me that imagination is like a muscle; the more I use it in my classroom, the easier it becomes in real life.