Qatar Academy’s Literacy Week opened with a challenge: “Today is the start of the literacy week; this means that students should not be weak. The library has prepared many competitions, to sharpen your literary ambitions.”
“Literacy is enjoyable and the chosen activities are the ones we know the students enjoy. It gets them talking about books,” Alison Lindstrom, Literacy Coordinator at the primary school shares.
The week kicked off with Drop Everything and Read, a full 20-minute period dedicated to reading.
Among the highlights was the Read-a-Thon which, according to Early Childhood Teacher-Librarian Stacey Socholotuk, “is a fun and engaging way to motivate students to read, read again and then read some more!” She also relates that “this reading happens both at school and home and involves families and the school community in supporting our students as lifelong readers of many genres and formats”.
Throughout the week the library was the top destination for students and this gave two grade 4 students the novel idea of generating their own contest with a little help from Primary Librarian Selma Kennedy.
“Noor and Alyaa from 4E love coming to the library for book exchange and thought students should get the chance to be a ‘Librarian for a Day’,” Kennedy says. “Together we worked with setting up a contest – they set the rules and after putting together some clues to questions, they visited classes to encourage participation”.
