Each year it is an exciting time of the year when Book Week begins. This year we celebrated it from 27th to 31st March focusing on the theme ‘Read, Grow, Inspire’ and making connections with 25 years of Mahindra International School. The week was packed with events such as: Author/Illustrator visits, a Book Character Parade, displays highlighting 25 years of MIS and books published 25 years ago, quizzes, a book fair and much more.
Meeting Authors and Illustrators is a powerful learning opportunity. On Monday 27th March, storyteller Ms. Sherline Pimenta came to our early years and told an interactive story of Mr. Wiggle and Mr. Waggle to our EY1 and 2 learners. This story involved lots of action and movement and our learners enjoyed acting it out with Ms. Sherline. With EY3, Ms. Sherline told a story of a girl, Aru, who was very angry as her dad was delayed picking her up from school one day. She showed them the “angry emotion meter” which begins from being happy and moves up to getting super angry. The EY3 learners later color coded the emotion meter.
Tuesday 28th March, the P1 and 2 learners meet author Ms. Varsha Seshan. Ms. Varsha introduced them to all the books she has written and briefly talked about them. She chose 3 chapters from her anthology ‘Dragonflies, Jigsaw and Seashells’ to share with P2. She gave an outline of each story, read excerpts from the chapters followed by a fun activity to stimulate their imagination. With P1, she talked about her story ‘The Clockwala clues’. This is a story of two friends Jasmine and Sheba who want to spend their holiday finding home for stray puppies. To do that they have to solve a puzzle. P1 learners enjoyed the story and a tongue-twisting follow-up activity.
Mr. Akshay Jugdhar, an Illustrator, visited our P3 learners on Wednesday, 29th March. He is a children’s book illustrator and has over 12 years of digital painting experience. He talked to our P3 learners about the process of planning and designing illustrations based on the storyline. The P3 learners were enthralled to see various samples of Mr. Akshay’s work. He then demonstrated the step-by-step process of drawing a mouse using simple shapes. The P3 learners were thrilled to illustrate and add their creative thinking to their drawings.
On Thursday, 30th March, we had EY1 to P5 learners dressed up as characters from the world of children’s literature, this was for our book parade which began with the primary teachers performing the famous picture book ‘Chicka chicka boom boom’ by Bill Martin Jr. The learners loved to see their teachers in action. Mr. Arijit Mallick, an author of the book ‘Fun Games with Scratch 3.0’ met our P4 and P5 learners. He talked about coding and programming and showed them the basics of how Scratch works. He also shared a few samples of games designed by his students. Mr. Arijit also shed light on the book writing process right from the rough draft to the final publication. The learners had lots of interesting questions for Mr. Arijit.
On Friday, 31st March, our own author, Ms. Helen, had an interactive question answer session with our P5 learners based on her book “Teaching Globally: the untold story”. The P5 learners designed their questions based on her teaching experience, reading habits, her inspirations, future writing projects to name a few.
To mark 25 years of MIS, we-
- Asked all our learners to list 25 books that they read in each time frame.
- Displayed the top 25 books checked-out in 2022-23.
- Displayed 25 books that we published 25 years ago (1998)
- Voted for the top 25 books that our learners want for our Library.
Throughout the week, the homeroom teams invited various teachers, administration, and support staff members to read aloud out to their learners. We hosted a book fair by Word Book shop on Tuesday and Wednesday. We added a lot of books from the fair to our ever-growing primary library.
It was a power-packed week!!
-Ms. Devaki
Librarian
