The Literula Week @ Shiv Nadar School, Gurgaon
The Literula week.
"That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet" 1
In motion with the need of the hour that is being safe by staying at home and tuning in to the virtual classes, what better could we do for our children than inculcate and reiterate in them, the love for reading? With this thought in mind, we at Shiv Nadar school decided to carry on with our tradition and sprinkle the pixie dust by virtually taking them to the land of books via the virtual celebration of Literula Week.
If anything, Shiv Nadar School is a constant. Constant in change, ever-evolving, ever-learning, ever adapting. This year the challenge was manifold, the teachers had to “virtually” hold the attention of their young wards, make the online sessions fun and get some learning in too! That’s where the “Book Fairy” was called in to help introduce the magic of reading to the Kindergarteners. Parents and grandparents conducted storytelling sessions.
The basic premise of Literula Week is to introduce books to students, age-appropriate, learn the parts of books, how to take care of books and develop a collection for the magic of joyous reading. Every grade picks an author and a book or two written by them, the class then spends the week reading, discussing and weaving in some activities around the same. Some creative pursuits were learning to make bookmarks, book covers, headgears, make or create musical instruments, dressing up as characters from the books that fascinate them. Students were encouraged to express their interpretation of the stories, recreate the starting or ending, re-title the story, keep the basic premise of the story but add some new twists or spice it up a bit, create puzzles and quizzes, riddles in Sanskrit!
This year our middle and senior school students also learned the usage of technology to express their creativity with padlet and nearpod. The much loved “circle time” brought forth insights about the student’s thoughts and change in the thought process as their life experiences increased.
Keeping the tradition of Author visits alive, Grade 6 was visited by Author, Vaishali Shroff. Her book, “The Adventures of Padma and the Blue Dinosaur” was much loved by the students. She kept them interested and showed them a real fossil of the dinosaurs from her collection. For the seniors there was a session with Col. Gopal speak about “How Reading Influenced Me”, Monica Ma’am, spoke about “The Happiness DOSE” and Ms Saumya Kulshrestha explained the nuances of poetry.
The Literula Week is not a just part of the Shiv Nadar School curriculum, it’s the very DNA of the school where reading is promoted from an early age.
Reference 1 - From The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.
