A couple of weeks ago has seen our book week 2012.
Throughout Book Week, BISS has been celebrating the theme “One World Many Stories”, to encourage students to read, discover new authors and develop their writing skills. The school was a buzz of activity with parents and students visiting the book fair, book authors and storytellers mesmerizing us, the fantastic dress-up day, and a hugely successful “living library”.
BISS hosted a “Book Fair” with loads of great books. The Book Fair was located at the cafeteria and students parents and teachers had the opportunity to select and buy moderately priced books to take home.
As part of the Book Week program, BISS invited Dr. Liang Hong, author of “China as in Liang Village” who carried out a writer’s workshop for our Secondary School Students.
British author Emily Gravett author and illustrator of Spells, The Odd Egg, Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears, Monkey and Me and Meerkat Mail came to speak to Grade 4 and 5 about the process as to how she develops her work. Emily Gravett had our students with activities based around her series of playful, rhyming books. From Action rhymes, creating creatures to storyboarding a story, all the students in Grade 4 and 5 enjoyed 90 minutes of fun filled action with Ms. Gravett.
A diplomat, an actress, an Alzheimer’s disease specialist, an athlete, a UN Peacemaker, an artist, a holocaust survivor… One of the week’s highlights was the living library, a mobile library set up as a space for dialogue and interaction.
At the “Living Library” books are people, and they can be borrowed for 30 minutes, creating a save environment for dialog and allowing “the reader” to engage in a personal conversation with their chosen ‘books’. Students visiting the living library were given the opportunity to speak informally with “people on loan”; this latter group being extremely varied in age, sex and cultural background.
Coming along with our book week theme, “One World Many Stories”, elementary students and teachers took part in a dress-up day where each grade level represented a literary genre. This presented a good opportunity for each class to study its assigned genre and explore some book characters.
The week of activities finished off with a fantastic Book Week assembly where Grade 5 students Irene, Manoli, Annie, Dhaanyia, and 3rd graders Sajid and Hanson used a TV NEWS format video to broadcast the book week activities to our community.
The event concluded with Ms. O’Dwyer choir enthralling the audience with their outstanding choral performance of the Book Week theme song “One World Many Stories”.
We feel that Book Week 2012 was a great success and that comes down to all the effort that students and staff went to. Thank you all very much.
We are already looking forward to the next one!