This week has been all about reading at St Bernadette’s Dundas Valley!
We have seen many children, and even some parents, enjoy our Book Fair. The Book Fair is a wonderful opportunity for students to have a real voice and choice in what they read and for their parents to understand what excites their children about reading. There was a huge array of reading options presented and lots of other gadgets, such as spy kits, rubiks cubes, sewing kits and even ooshies to get kids reading different types of texts. A big thank you to Miss Simone and Mrs Sidoti for their assistance in organising the Book Fair and helping get the books out to the children.
Our teachers have also been diving deeply into reading this week by working with one of our CEDP Teacher Educators, Lise Sercombe, who has been working with us on Shared and Guided Reading texts in different Stages. Our focus has been on choosing challenging texts for each Stage and thinking about the Skill, Will and Thrill of engaging texts for our classrooms. There are so many amazing books that are launched every year and we were looking for new texts to match the changing inquiry focus of our key learning areas.
The importance of reading cannot be underestimated. Children who are read to early in their lives have a larger vocabulary than children who have not been read to and children who continue to read at home daily have better vocabulary, imagination and writing skills than those who don’t. Finding something that your children want to read is half the battle and it is great that we can offer a Book Fair so children can have many options to get them reading every day.
Mrs Willard