2022.09.23

Toyonaka - School Blog | 23 September 2022

We had a wonderful and exciting event this month, where we celebrated our literacy week and international literacy day.

As with all our events, we had several events across the span of five days, with each day bringing new activities and learning opportunities to keep little minds growing.

On Monday we started things off by getting creative and becoming messy. We all made crafts and posters related to our favourite stories and nursery rhymes. Early Nursery class made “Peter Rabbit” faces from paper plates, while Nursery class made little paper eggs styled after “Humpty Dumpty”

Junior Kindy and Preschool made posters about “Little Blue Truck”, and “Fly Guy'' respectively. These two classes were also part of our annual poster making contest, where the parents could vote for their favourite poster.

Tuesday was especially Exciting because not only did we come dressed up as our favourite book characters, but we also had our “book buddy” event. Preschool and Junior Kindy joined Early Nursery and Nursery classes for paired and group reading activities. The older children were really excited to share their favourite books with their younger friends.

Of course it was made all the more fun since we completed these tasks while in costume. We had mermaids, pirates and heroes galore! It was a very fun way for use to express our love of stories in a creative manner.

The next day, Wednesday, saw the whole school working together to make a story book. The younger children completed this task by filling in blank sections of our story with pictograms and simple yet colourful graphics, while the older children engaged in some writing, with Junior Kindy class working together to write whole pages of our story.

The book, “The Rainbow Circle”, has been bound and will be added to the library of stories that we have made collectively as a school. We are sure that it will be enjoyed for many years to come!

With the arrival of Thursday we were ready to show off some of the hard work we had been doing in the days and weeks building up to this event. Our speech festival took place on this day and was streamed live to all the parents. Nursery class was first with Early Nursery observing. They did a recital of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and also a call-and-answer reading of “Brown Bear Brown Bear”, by Eric Carle.

Preschool performed a team recital of “Lotsa Pasta”, by Julie Harding, while Junior Kindy class recited the poem “The Secret of the Machines” by Rudyard Kipling. These were completed entirely by the children, without teacher assistance. They did a wonderful job indeed!

The final Event day, Friday, was “Drop Everything and Read” (D.E.A.R). A smaller but equally fun event where at the sound of a bell, all students stop what they are doing and find a book to read for a few minutes. This is made extra fun by the fact that the bell could sound at any moment, making the activity a fun surprise.

Finally, throughout the week we enjoyed a “Mystery Reader” and a “Read-a-thon” activity. The Mystery Reader activity had several parents joining our classes, either in person or via remote connection, in order to read a story to the children. We got to see an interesting variety of books and stories that we otherwise would not have. The Read-a-thon was a challenge where we had to record our reading for the week. If we completed reading thirteen books within the week, we could win a special prize, a bookmark, from the office. Many children and parents tried their best in these activities. It was quite fun to be exposed to such an interesting variety of reading activities.

With this our Literacy Week is brought to a close. Thank you everyone for participating! We look forward to another fun Literacy Week next year!