Book Week

Our school promotes reading and we just finished our Book Week. The teachers planned activities to celebrate the delights of reading. Each day teachers spent ten minutes reading to a class they didn’t know so well and shared some of their favourite books. 

We culminated this week in a book character parade on Friday 5 June at the school auditorium. The students were encouraged to think of a simple way to represent a favourite book character. They were told not to go all out for expensive costumes, but just simple dress ups.   

Parents are encouraged to join in class parades to share their characters with the rest of the school.

There were always some very inventive ideas. There were the usual princesses,   little red riding hood, Cinderella, fairies, pirates, spiderman and so on.

The class that won everyone's cheers was the lava lava class. They wore the green Tongan floral skirt and had frangipani leis. Everyone clapped as their  teacher led them in a Polynesian dance, and all the kids hulaed along to the strumming of their ukelele.

It is a wonderful opportunity for demonstrating that learning can be fun, and an opportunity for the teachers to let their hair down.

Can you guess which book character I was. The photo is a clue. Later in class, I got the students to act out my adaptation of the story ending with "This is the saddiest story in the whole wide world." They loved it.

Did you guess right? It is the The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. It is appropriate as our weather was just so cold. Jack Frost made out thermometer go down to minus 3 degrees C. We never had it so cold. It was also so foggy that I couldn't see twenty meters ahead of me when I was driving to school.

Sorry, I couldn't post photos of the children, We have a policy here in New Zealand. It's a pity, you would have enjoyed them.