Reading Week is a week during which students are engaged in fun activities dedicated to reading. We celebrate Reading week to encourage the love for reading and learning. Why do we need a reading week at all? What happens when you read? We need a reading week to help students read because when you start reading, it’s like a whole wonderful new world! Because I believe that there’s a right book, or a lot of right books, for everyone, including you, you just have to find it.
The first day of Reading Week 2022 was Tuesday, 01/Feb/2022. The first activity for me and the other 4th graders today was making a comic strip.
We had 30 minutes in the morning, where we first watched a short French film called ‘ Un monde à découvrir ’ (A world to discover). In this film there was a little boy who walked into a library with his mother, he picked up a book and started reading, and grew old reading. The film showed the little boy growing older as he climbed a bookshelf and at the end, he discovered that books have the power to take you places. As the film showed who was once a little boy, now an old man at the top of the super tall bookshelf in outer space staring at an alien (Who was reading a book on another bookshelf). The message, also, was that books have the power to take you places.
Later, we made comic strips related to reading on the website makebeliefscomix.com (A website that lets you make comic strips online).
Makebeliefscomix.com is quite easy to use, you can make a maximum of 18 panels, for the activity we needed a minimum of 6 panels. There are objects, backgrounds, characters, emojis, speech bubbles, prompts and lots more you can use in your comics.
In mine, I showed a man named Jack who had run away from the human world and lived in a jungle because he thought that the world out there was too complicated. One day after he and his animal friends had lunch, they saw a man coming and hiding because they thought he was going to take Jack back to the real world, the man was reading a book and had dropped it while he was walking. After the man left, Jack picked the book up and read it, he imagined himself in the book and found himself in fascinating places. Jack wanted more books so he went to the real world and started reading, like that he became an avid reader and a very smart person.
As you saw with Jack, reading is important because it helps minds learn and grow, and helps vocabulary and grammar. Reading also helps your creative juices flow and helps you imagine. It expands our knowledge and helps us learn about different cultures and things we never even thought would exist.
There are different genres of books! Mystery, Sci-Fi, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and hundreds more, there are books on almost everything!
Engaging students in fun activities dedicated to reading helps those who are not interested in reading to start the habit and enjoy it, that is the goal of Reading week.
