Booked Inn

I’ve reported on my school’s very successful reading picnics before: eg. here and here, and today we scored another home run!

Recently, I happened upon a revelation that children’s author, and former member of The School Magazine’s editorial team, Cassandra Golds, had been a former student of our school, so I went about inviting her to be our special guest at today’s reading picnic. Theme: Teddy bears. Dress: Pyjamas. What fun!

Cassandra was an excellent speaker, and comes with my highest recommendation. The students were abuzz for weeks before her visit. I fired up the kids quite a bit and they were very excited to meet a successful ex-student.

The Stage 1 students had plenty of questions about “where the library used to be” and Cassandra’s time at the school.

Our Stage 2 students are midway through “The mostly true story of Matthew & Trim”, a graphic novel illustrated by Stephen Axelson, originally serialised over two years when Cassandra was still at The School Magazine. Our students are working on the HSIE unit on Australia in class, so the graphic novel is working so well in library lessons. I’m practically doing Geoffrey McSkimming-style stand-up orations while reading them the story! (I do exaggerate, but it’s been fun.) I had the students enthralled with Trim “the demon cat” when explorer Matthew Flinders and Trim were in England. I’m looking forward to the arrival of the dodos myself. (Yes, Mauritian dodos. It’s complicated.)

The Stage 3 students were fortunate to be the very first audience to hear a rather spooky chapter from Cassandra’s new book, “The museum of Mary Child”. They were already familiar with Cassandra’s other novel titles, “Michael and the secret war” and “Clair-de-lune”.

Our now-traditional reading picnics are usually in that last hour of the day, after the lunch break. We usually gather at the podium, talk about the theme. In the past we’ve had a recipe theme, building anniversary trivia, spring, multicultural, etc – then we break up into smaller groups, or students take their parents to shady spots around the grounds, until we again gather to sum up.

At last year’s September picnic, I brought out a graph to record our Premier’s Reading Challenge results. This year we added a new annual tally and Cassandra presented certificates to the school from MSN Readathon, and another celebrating the students’ success with the PRC – up 2% on last year’s results to 80%.

We cycled groups through the hall to meet Cassandra in more intimate groups, and the afternoon was over before we knew it. A fabulous whole-community focus on literacy and the love of reading!

A big thank you to Cassandra Golds! And to teacher Kerrie Mead, who organises the picnics and does a great job promoting them in innovative ways.

An aside: Cassandra and I realised that the whole of our planning for her visit had been conducted online via Facebook. Welcome to Web 2.0!

Our whole school community has just celebrated their love of reading this afternoon with our quarterly reading picnic – a great sight to behold: 400 students, their teachers, students’ parents and toddler siblings, spread out in groups scattered throughout the school playground, enjoying books and nibblies in a wonderful picnic atmosphere.

These celebrations have become an end-of-term tradition here over recent years, and they are so effective at bringing a community together with a literacy focus. This term we has an emphasis on procedural writing as our reading matter, with student-made recipes collected in a school cookbook, and baskets of commercial picture books, School Magazine issues and recipe books. There was also a quiz about bizarre foods, with prizes for successfully completed entries.

The last of my Wilfrid book rap groups had an opportunity to finish off their elderly resident outlines yesterday – it was frantic here last week, with Book Fair and Grandparents’ Day – and I’ve just taken digital photos of their work, which I’ll add to the rap blog’s Gallery tonight.

It’s been a busy end-of-term. While the rest of the staff were at the student disco, I presented the Wilfrid rap blog and wiki pages to a group of our parents on Tuesday night and they were surprised/enthused/fascinated at how we had harnessed the capabilities of Web 2.0 to share such meaningful learning and teaching, especially that their children had been communicating with students all over Australia and even Vietnam. While preparing my talk, I re-read the early introductory messages again this week, and it was a great reminder at how far the groups of rappers and their teachers had come in such a short time!

We are always looking for opportunities to improve community involvement in school life and promoting our website, blog and wiki URLs for parents to access at home will go a long way to fostering such involvement.

Next term’s reading picnic coincides with ALIA’s simultaneous reading of the picture book, Arthur. We have big plans for that one. Watch this space!