World Read Aloud Day

On March 6th 2013 my 4th Grade class at Jakarta International School celebrated World Read Aloud Day. The day kicked off with a Skype call to L.A. to no other than Cornelia Funke, the author of the Inkheart series and our present read aloud, The Thief Lord. Cornelia was an excellent interviewee and was so interested in the children and their questions. We in turn were fascinated to find out more about her books and how she gets her ideas and how she writes. Most of our questions were about the Thief Lord. We asked her who her favourite character was, which part was the most difficult to write and how she thought of the characters' names. She told us she loved Harry Potter books and the Narnia series and that two of her favourite authors are Phillip Pullman and Neil Gaiman. From a teacher's perspective, it was great to hear her say that she keeps a writer's notebook to jot down her ideas, how she writes her first drafts in a journal first before typing them up and how it took at least 13 drafts of The Thief Lord before she finished it. Nice for my students to really see the connection that what we do in Writer's Workshop, is what real writers do too. Cornelia Funke was such an engaging and enthusiastic author to Skype with and it was so nice of her to Skype my class. I had got her email off her website and thought, 'Let me ask her if she'll Skype us', not really thinking I would hear back from her but I got an email back from her straight away. It just proves that you don't get things in this world if you don't try. 

After our fabulous Skype interview, we went down to our buddy KG class to read picture books to them. The Grade 4s had chosen the books the day before during their library session and had practised reading them, working on their fluency and their expression. KG also read the books they had made about themselves to us. Not ones to be left out, Mr Dee, the KG teacher read a book, 'The Book that Wants to Eat You'. The kids loved this book which is all about a book which eats unsuspecting children and adults, especially if they have traces of food on their fingers, or cookies in their pockets. I got the chance to read my favourite picture book to KG, The Lion Who Wanted to Love. I just love this story, the moral and the illustrations in this great book. It was wonderful to have the chance to share it to 40 children who had never heard it before. 

Next came a Skype with Tanja Galetti, the Elementary librarian at Hong kong Academy and close personal friend. We used to work together at Lincoln Community School, Ghana. Tanja would always amaze me how well she knew the children as readers and it was very rare that a child didn't read, and love, the books she recommended to them individually. Tanja is an amazing reader, librarian and girl geek. You can read her children's book recommendations on her Shelfari page and follow her on Twitter. We, and some of the Grade 4 teachers, co read a story from the "You Read to Me, I Read to You' series entitled 'The Little Red Hen and the Small Grain of Wheat'. Our 4th grade classes then swapped some of their book recommendations.  It was great to have this inter-schools collaboration and to co-facilitate with a great friend.

After that my class were thrilled to go to another Grade 4 class and share the iBooks we had made from our recent realistic fiction unit. We had written the stories using Google Docs and then drawn illustrations. They then used the Book Creator app on the iPad to turn their story into an iBook. The students were thoroughly motivated by creating iBooks and creating such a professional looking book using this app. As always, they loved having an authentic audience to share their books with and enjoyed the experience more sharing their published works on the iPad.

The afternoon started off with Ms Wolff’s reading of ‘Goldilocks and Just One Bear’ which was a great twist on the Goldilocks story which the students loved. I had never heard of this book before but it is a great book to include when looking at different versions of fairy tales. Of course, my 4th graders loved it and throughly enjoyed seeing the plot unravel and seeing how it connected to the original story. I realise I must read more picture books to my 4th graders as there are so many excellent ones out there. 

I then had the chance to share my favourite iPad app with my 4th Graders, "The Fantastic flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore". They loved the interactive book as well as the picture book version I have.  Then we had time to squeeze in some of our read aloud The Thief Lord. 

Grade 6 students have been reading and writing historical fiction so they came down to read different historical fiction picture books to us. The grade 4s loved this interaction and again it was a good reminder to do more inter-school interaction. 

What I loved about our World Read Aloud day was making the global connections. The students were so thrilled to be able to speak to people in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Next year I would also like to do similar activities but also send more time locally, reading with and to local Indonesian school children in English, and or Bahasa. My students definitely experienced and were enthused about the joy of reading. Hopefully next year we can spread that fervour to children in our host country by reading aloud and sharing books with them.