The St Andrews International School Book Week Committee,
made up of Carole Parker, Jude Payne, Cailin Terhaar, Shane Gielty, Dave
Hyde, Michelle Taylor & Damon Parker, put together the following book report
for St Andrews International School’s annual Book Week.
Character Dress Parade
For Book Week, St Andrews had their annual character parade which was better
than ever! It was really great to see so many students, teachers and parents
getting into the spirit by creating and wearing such an amazing array of
imaginative costumes.
The assembly started with a classic story, “The three little pigs” which was
ambushed by some very shady characters making a series of unjustifiable
demands of our narrator, all in good humour of course!
Visiting Author Ian Billings
Book week got off to a fantastic start with everyone roaring with laughter
at the jokes and antics of our visiting author Ian Billings. Ian worked with
all the year groups from Nursery up to Year 7 providing our students with a
great insight into how to build characters and stories.
With the younger children he created a visual representation of a character
by having students describe facial features one at a time until a clear and
comical face had been created. The children really enjoyed choosing large
eyes, small noses, curly hair and bushy eyebrows to build their character.
With the older children Ian encouraged them to play the part of a new
character. The volunteers chose from a range of props Ian drew on the board
and under Ian’s guidance and direction the other students asked the
volunteer questions about their character to find out, among other things,
the character’s distinguishing feature and their desire or goal. Ian
explained that all main characters have something which makes them memorable
or stand out and a wish or desire, something they have to achieve in the
story.
Other children got to act out a story by representing features of a setting
during the beginning, middle or end of a story. Some were trees, rocks or
grass, while others were creaky doors, dirty ovens or safe houses. Other
children were then put into this setting as characters in the story, walking
from the beginning, through the middle and, to the end while Ian told the
story. This gave students a very good visual idea of how a story flows and
moves.
At the end of the day Ian performed a 1 hour show to the whole of primary,
telling jokes, stories and poetry from his upcoming and recent books.
Design a book cover competition
This year for book week we had an all-primary competition to design a new
book cover for a fiction book. The students choose their favourite fiction
book and created a new cover for it based on their own creativity and ideas
about the book.
We had a lot of students participating throughout the year levels and it was
very difficult for our teacher judges to choose a winner! The winners for
each year were - Year 1: Adam, Year 2: Cael, Year 3: Kim, Year 4: Peter, and
Year 6: Jennifer. The winning students each got to choose a book to take
home as a prize. Thank you to all of the students who participated in this
fun book week activity!
Classroom activities
The classrooms were buzzing with activity during book week. Everyone
appeared to be entranced by books. Children in Year 4 were writing book
reports, the Year 1s were busy creating their own settings and in Year 2
they all appeared to be obsessed by a large monster with sharp claws, a
poisonous wart on its nose and purple scales on its back. Even in music
class the children made books about musical symbols.
As for the Secondary children they seemed to find it difficult to find their
own classrooms. They were often to be found in lots of different primary
classrooms reading with the children, sharing books and reading their own
books to small groups of students. When they did manage to find their way
they were busy with book reports, Literary quizzes and the Reading Marathon!
The children get involved and
draw their own book characters
Book cover competition
winners.
Seb from Kindergarten loved
getting
involved in character making with author Ian Billings.
Laughing and joking with the
early years children.
Goldilocks and the 3 Bears
make an entrance.
