During the past week, we spent time with each class reflecting on our Literacy Week. With our youngest readers, we initiated the conversations with a read-aloud of Todd Parr's The Thankful Book. Some of the things our students in EC were thankful for during Literacy Week were:

• Being comfy and reading lots during Pyjama Day
• Enjoying hot cocoa and cookies with read-alouds
• Buying new books during the book fair
• Finding out what everyone's favourite book was during Book Character Day

...and, of course, the author visits by Ya Chin Chang and Mio Debnam, our students especially enjoying their great storytelling skills and learning more about how books are being made.

Our students in Upper Primary not only shared what they enjoyed during Literacy Week but also what they learned from Mio Debnam's author visit. Here are some examples:

What we enjoyed during Literacy Week...

• Creativity during the Book Character Day parade - so many different characters and books
• Feeling nice and cozy while reading throughout the day on Pyjama Day
• Multiage literacy activities - all connected to magic and involving the unlocking of boxes
• "Under cover" reading spots in the library
• Lots of books to choose from during the book fair
• Being part of and seeing others on the 12h Continuous Reading Chair
• Meeting Mio Debnam
• Hot cocoa & cookie storytime

 
What we learned from/about Mio Debnam...

• The behind the scenes of how a news article is written
• Alliteartions are important in writing news headlines
• The editor is responsible for choosing the illustrator
• She became a reader when she found the right books
• In making books there is writing, editing and proof-reading
• You can be an author and editor at the same time
• She started writing for a school newspaper
• She had 18 books published so far.

Further, they suggested some new ideas we librarians might want to consider for next year's Literacy Week:

• Book character fashion show
• Book writing competition
• Schoolwide book hunt
• Everyone adding to a Google document about the book characters spotted during Book Character Day
• Keeping multiage literacy activities connected to a theme/a book like this year
• Read Aloud Day / reading all day
• Students sharing their books/writing.

Generally, it was wonderful hearing everyone still speak so enthusiastically about our Literacy Week celebrations and I am so thankful for everyone who helped make it such a special week.

Last week, HKA went "under cover" to celebrate Literacy Week with a wide range of literacy-based activities, events and initiatives, and of course lots and lots of extra reading time. There was a wonderful buzz of excitement felt throughout the school throughout the week, the level of engagement and participation from across the community showing once again how much literacy is valued and appreciated at HKA. Our Literacy Week celebrations were, as we had planned and hoped, received as a precious gift. While it will take me some time to share with you the many wonderful moments from the past week, I want to begin by giving you an overview of my Top 10, in the order they happened last week. As we reflect with students about the week and events, I will share more through this blog. Enjoy!

Our week started with an inspiring visit by author, editor and journalist Mio Debnam who provided fantastic insights into the writing and publishing process, both for books and news stories. It was wonderful seeing the instant connection between Mrs. Debnam and our students who clearly enjoyed sharing some of their knowledge around writing and learning more from such an experienced writer. A special treat in the sessions for K-1 and G2-3 was seeing and hearing the exciting story Jifu's Twist of Luck, as Mrs Debnam is also a wonderful storyteller. Our Grade 4 & 5 students co-wrote a news story in their session with Mrs Debnam who had brought along a scoop, which is still much discussed in our library, about Mr Dean falling into a river while salmon fishing in Oregon last weekend.

On Tuesday, we had author / illustrator / artist Ya Chin Chang with us. She shared her beautiful wordless story The Window as well as the creative process she went through in making it. It was wonderful seeing also our youngest readers and writers engage with Ms. Chang, confidently helping her to tell the story and sharing their wonderings about the story and the making of it with her. A special treat for our students was getting to help re-create The Window on one of our library windows and receiving a copy of a sketch from Ms. Chang to add their own illustrations to. One of our PK2 students excitedly brought along to the session a copy of her book which he had discovered and bought at the book fair - which Ms. Chang then signed for him.

On Tuesday, our students also enjoyed visiting a book fair, organised by local Sai Kung book store Kidnapped. It was wonderful hearing our students excitedly call out to each other on discovering books they know, on seeing them handle the books with much care and appreciation, and at times, simply sitting down and beginning to read right then and there. Our students really know and love their books; and the Kidnapped staff  always does a wonderful job in preparing for and running the fair.

Wednesday was our much anticipated Book Character Day. What stood out to me was that over the years students have fully embraced it as a day of celebrating a favourite book, making sure that they have this book with them on the day to talk about it with others during the parade. Further, I don't think we have ever had such a wide variety of books and characters represented. Yes, there were favourites like the Harry Potters but overall there were many, many different characters, some from books that have been loved for years, others from very recent publications. Our students definitely know their books and characters - and have wonderfully supportive parents, helping them in getting their often very creative outfits together.

After the book character parade on Wednesday, our students in K-5 went through stations of literacy-based activities, inspired by Brian Selznick's book The Houdini Box. Students got to hear the story of a young boy who desperately wants to become a magician and escape artists like his idol Harry Houdini. Then they got a chance to try out for themselves to be like Houdini by learning magic tricks (ask your child to show you the magic pencil tricks, it is brilliant!) and by solving riddles and clues to unlock the combination padlocks of our breakout boxes. I always love seeing our older students taking the younger ones under their wings and engaging them in the activities.

On Thursday, our PS Battle of the Books team was up against a well prepared team of parents and teachers to show their knowledge around five of the twenty books from this year's list. It seems that parents and students take turns in winning this match which has become a much anticipated event on our Literacy Week calendar: this year, it was again the parents turn to win. Congratulations! While most were new to the process, they clearly had very detailed knowledge of the books - another great example of how our parents model their own reading lives and love for reading for our students. Beautiful!

We celebrated the grand finale of the week on Friday amongst others with a Pyjama day and the very popular Continuous Reading Chairs. From 7:30am to 7:30pm, at two different locations and livestreamed by our amazing Tech Department, members from across the HKA community could be seen reading, either independently or at times with a group/class of students. The reading chairs are always a great example of HKA being a community that shares a great love for reading. 

In numbers never seen before in our library, students and parents joined our Hot Cocoa and Cookie Storytime on Friday afternoon. We knew how excited our students were about the event but were still blown away by the fantastic turnout. Many families took advantage of the extended opening hours until 7:30pm, some stopping by for a shorter amount of time, others staying up to the end. It was great seeing families read together, students sharing stories with each other or just sitting together, reading independently. As the title of the book Ms Marné shared at the beginning of the afternoon, it was indeed Not a Quiet Library but wonderful to see how it didn't stop anyone from enjoying books together, embracing our students' contagious excitement and enthusiasm around reading.

 Walking through the halls last week, I loved seeing the classroom door displays evolve continuously. There was much variety and creativity in the displays and I encourage you, should you be on campus this week, to have a closer look. We were also excited that by Friday night our library window project to re-create the window from Ya Chin Chang's book was completed. Feel free to stop by the library to read the full story.

Throughout the week, students were caught reading - and enthusiastically pointed out peers they had caught reading. 

It was a wonderful week and I am filled with much gratitude to everyone who helped prepare, plan, and celebrate this week. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! 

Literacy Week is finally here! Celebrate with us a week with fun literacy-based initiatives and events. The main events to look out for this week are:

MONDAY: Author visit by Mio Debnam (K-5)

TUESDAY: Author visit by Ya Chin Chang (PK1 & PK2) and Book Fair (UG)

WEDNESDAY: Book Character Day and Literacy Activities; (Author visit by Howard Wong, G6-8)

THURSDAY: BoB friendly match against parents

FRIDAY: Pyjama Day, Continuous Reading Chair, and Hot Cocoa & Cookie Storytime (RSVP!)

We will update the blog regularly. So stay tuned!

Happy Literacy Week! 

This past week, we continued with our Literacy Week preparations, in particular getting ready for our visiting authors. We will have two different visits in the Primary School as part of our Literacy Week this year: Mio Debnam, an author, editor and journalist, will be visiting with our students in K-5 on Monday, March 4; and Ya Chin Chang, an author, illustrator and artist, will meet our PK1 & PK2 students on Tuesday, March 5. 

After learning a bit about the background of the respective author, our students were quick in sharing lots of questions and wonderings. They know, this is a wonderful opportunity to learn from the experts, to get further insights into the writing/creative process, to gain tips and ideas for their own writing and book making. Below are a few examples of their questions.

Our youngest bookmakers too were not shy in sharing their wonderings and were especially excited to learn that an illustrator can also work with a song writer / musician, as you can see in the beautiful video below (this song is also available in book format and the result of the creative collaboration of Ya Chin Chang and Miya Dunets).

Further, our PK2 students made preparations to work on a special project with the artist - but that is still a bit of a surprise :)

Check into our blog frequently next week, to get updates on all of our Literacy Week events and initiatives.

... which is exactly one of the reasons why we at HKA dedicate an entire week once a year to celebrating literacy. With literacy events and initiatives like author visits, Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) Time, Book Character Day, a 12h Continuous Reading Chair and multiage literacy-based activities, we show and let our students experience what a special gift reading is, how it brings joy to an entire community, yes, even spreading the love for reading beyond our HKA Community if we think of our read-a-thon in support of Bring Me a Book Hong Kong.

So what do we have in store for this year's Literacy Week, which will take place from March 4-8? We shared the following Literacy Week trailer with our students last week, to provide them with an overview.

After watching the video, we spent time talking about some of the events the students are in particular looking forward to: Book Character Day, Pajama Day and the Hot Cocoa & Cookie Story Time in the library. Since many of our students have celebrated Literacy Week with us already several times, they are well aware of the meaning behind Book Character Day: an opportunity to celebrate and share with others a favourite book by dressing up as a character from that book for the day. Our students know that therefore the key accessory on the day is the actual book as so beautifully demonstrated by a group of students during our Book Character parade last year. We brainstormed possible book characters to dress up as and as you can see further below, our students had lots of wonderful ideas already.

Further, we talked about how students can contribute to our display this year. In line with our theme "HKA Goes Under Cover", we invite everyone to be investigators / journalists, interviewing a friend, family member, teacher about their reading, for example; or writing an exciting book review or other reading-related news story. Templates were shared with parents via email before the LNY break and we also have more hard copies of those available in the library.

Most excited are students about the idea of "catching someone reading". ​In addition to taking or drawing a picture of the person reading, we encourage our students to chat with the person they caught reading: what is it they are reading; are they enjoying the book; what do they like about it? The ultimate goal is to have conversations about books, to share our love for reading and for stories with each other. During the past week, lots of students were already "caught reading". Here is a small selection.

Here are the most important events to add to your calendar:

• Tuesday, March 5: Book Fair (Kidnapped) on the UG Floor near the Cafe
  
• Wednesday, March 6: Book Character Day / HKA FLOW Literacy Activities
  
• Friday, March 8: Pajama Day
  
• Friday, March 8: Hot Cocoa and Cookie Story Time in the Library (RSVP - the sign-up will be shared via email on Monday, February 25.)
  

We look forward to seeing many of you celebrating Literacy Week with us!

Happy New Year! Happy Year of the Pig! May all your wishes for this new year come true!

I hope you all had a wonderful Lunar New Year break, enjoying quality time with family and friends, time to rest, relax, and read. I always appreciate the slower pace of a break, the extra time I get to enjoy with my family, and lots of uninterrupted reading time. Also during this past break as you can see in the picture collage below, I came across and enjoyed some wonderful books - some written for children, some for young adults, some for grown ups; most I enjoyed reading in print, one in the form of an audiobook. Since I started to keep track of and share my reading also through Instagram (if you would like to explore and/or follow my account, click on this link), I love being reminded of when and where I read a particular book, who might have been with me at the time. It has been a wonderful week, with many beautiful new memories made - and I hope you feel the same way about your past week too.

I am wishing you a great start back into regular school and work life and quickly wanted to remind you of important ongoing/upcoming events - I will of course share more over the next weeks and keep you posted.

Today, we joined readers around the world to mark World Read Aloud Day which is already celebrated for the tenth time, having more and more readers join each year. It is a wonderful opportunity to make extra time to enjoy a read-aloud together, while spreading awareness that literacy is a human right, yet still millions of people around the world are not able to read and write. For our students and all of us, it is a good reminder of how fortunate we are to learn/have learnt literacy skills and to have such beautiful libraries at our school.

While we celebrate reading every day throughout the year as one of my students pointed out, today we made some extra read-aloud time. Some classes, like our kindergarteners, prepared ahead of time, choosing some favourites to be read by their teachers - as you can see from the tweet below. I loved hearing that some HKA families have also made special read-aloud plans for later in the day, outside of school. It shows once again what a great community of readers we are.

World Read Aloud Day was not the only special event today. We celebrated reading further by launching our annual read-a-thon which will run through March 8, 2019. With the read-a-thon, which is a longstanding tradition at HKA, we spread our love for reading beyond our community by raising money in support of Bring Me a Book Hong Kong (BMABHK). BMABHK promotes family literacy around Hong Kong, providing access to quality literature to children. Just a couple of weeks ago, through BMABHK we made a book donation to a local primary school and our fourth graders shared read-alouds with the students there as part of the donation ceremony. (You can read more about it here.)

In case you are new to the read-a-thon, here is how it works (our fourth graders visited each classroom last week to explain it to their fellow primary students)
​

• Students ask family members / friends to sponsor their reading time.
• Then they write down the number of minutes they read each time this month.
• At the end of the read-a-thon, students calculate the total number of minutes read and collect the promised money from their sponsors.
• Students bring the money raised in form of a single cheque to our libraries.
• We hand over the total amount to Bring Me a Book Hong Kong.
• We participate in the installation of book case libraries and book donations organised by BMABHK.​

(Hard copies of the respective forms were sent home today. We also shared them earlier this week in electronic format with all parents.)

Have a lovely Lunar New Year Break!

This past week, our students in grades 3-5 spent time reflecting on who they are as readers at this point of the school year, to then identify an area to grow as readers in the second semester. It is important for us to give students time to think and talk about who they are as readers, uncovering and then furthering their reading identity. We do this by providing students with their check out history of the first semester and some sentence starters/prompts to reflect on what they see in the data once transferred into a bar graph. Of course, what they select from our library does often not cover their entire reading as many also read books from their home or the public library; but it provides valuable insights and general trends that are helpful in making them aware of their identify as readers to then set goals on how to move forward.

Many of our students expressed surprise at some of the observations they made and shared this in lively conversations with each other and us teachers; for example, discovering that they had read considerably more (or less) than they had thought; noticing the complete absence of particular genres in their book selection; as well as identifying changes to past trends in particular with regard to the amount of books checked out. It was interesting that few students were surprised to see what their reading preferences were, having a good idea about what they enjoy the most in books (when it comes to genre and format).

Among the most frequently mentioned areas students wish to grow in are making more time to read to increase the number of books they get to read and including a wider variety of genres in their selection. Over the weeks to come, we will look at what some of the barriers to achieving these goals might be - maybe making time to read outside of school or finding books they enjoy - and how we can eliminate or overcome these barriers. It will require as to look closer at our reading habits and how we might change the ones that interfere with our goals. We will also look at and/or revisit strategies that can be helpful, such as how to find books of interest in our library, how to share our reading with each other and how to make reading plans. In addition, we will of course keep introducing authors, titles and series.

In addition to the read-alouds and conversations about reading wishes, students had much opportunity to look for and check out books. It seemed that after the break, everybody was ready and extra excited to get new books. 

Generally, it seemed that everyone was keen on taking first steps towards making their wishes for reading come true this year, as they recommended books to one another, looked in different areas of the library than just where their preferred books are, and got right into reading after check out.

An exciting start to the year!

Time has flown by and we suddenly find ourselves at the end of winter break and in a new year, 2019. I hope you all had a wonderful time relaxing and re-energising, and are ready for this brand new year. May it bring only the very best for you and your families!

As you can see in the collages embedded in this post, I enjoyed time with my family visiting beautiful Japan and reading lots of wonderful books (picture books, novels for the middle grades, young adults and grown ups). I look very much forward seeing our students this week and hearing all about their winter break (reading) adventures. As we always do at the start of a new year, we will be reflecting about the past year and thinking about wishes where we might want our reading journey to take us during 2019. Whatever these individual wishes might look like, I hope they will involve lots of reading time and wonderful new books.

Reading has so many benefits - besides of course being one of the most magical endeavours ever - and we can't remind ourselves often enough about them. Just recently, I received a beautiful infographic from Penguin Random House summarising some of the big benefits of reading:

COGNITIVE 

• Improves memory
• Lengthens life
• Makes you smarter

PHYSICAL

• Relieves stress and lowers blood pressure
• Improves sleep

EMOTIONAL

• Makes you more empathetic.

I hope you will enjoy lots of wonderful books this year.

​Happy Reading!