Early Years & Primary Weekly Updates (17/4 - 21/4)

Dear Parents,
 

Today is World Book Day and this week we have been celebrating reading in a variety of fun ways. In every year there have been fun activities, here are just a few of them:

• Reading swap – Different year groups have been getting together for mixed age paired reading.
• Book stall – Fahasa have set up a book shop in our school, enabling all children to come and have an enjoyable browse and book buying experience.
• Children and staff have enjoyed dressing up as favourite character.
• Door decoration – classes competed to make the best reading-themed door display.
• Extreme Readers photos – reading in unusual places, in unusual ways.
• Wheel of fortune - In the library some children span the wheel to see which book to read.
• Musical Book Tasting – some classes also got to play ‘Musical Book Tasting’ in which they danced around the circle of chairs until the music stopped, then picked up and read the book on the chair they stopped randomly at. This gave children the chance to read more widely, dipping into genres they might never normally pick up.
 

Why is reading so important?

Good readers are more successful due to the many benefits on the reader.

Firstly, it give the brain a great workout and increases the reader’s concentration span. Secondly, it develops language skills, which is essential to meet the demands of bilingual learning. Also, the more your child reads, the more knowledge and understanding they will gain, and the greater there appetite to learn more will be. Furthermore, it develops the reader’s imagination and creativity by widening their experiences immeasurably. It also develops all-important social skills, because shared reading is very sociable and also because the reader learns to see through the eyes of others and thus acquires empathy. Finally, reading is great fun, the more you read, the more enjoyable it becomes.

Hopefully, your child will come home on World Book Day with an appetite for books. Please do help to keep that enthusiasm going, so they can make great progress.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Malcolm Wood (Mr.)
Head of Primary