On Friday, December 6th, schools around the world celebrated World Reading Day, a program that was sponsored by Scholastic Inc. It was a day where students across the world were encouraged to read.
The Kennedy School First Graders decided to participate in this program. They registered to be participants via the Scholastic website. All participants, including the Kennedy School First Graders, were given credit for participation in World Reading Day by being noted on the world map on the Scholastic web site . The First Graders and their teachers used the school’s SMART Board to visit the Scholastic website, locate New Jersey on the world map and to see their classes registered.
In honor of this day, the First Graders took a pledge to be lifelong readers and in return they received a pledge card. The First Grade teachers at Kennedy added another component to the project. On World Reading Day, all first graders learned how to compare and contrast different genres of books, including fiction and non-fiction. The students classified big books according to their genre and then drew illustrations, which captured the main idea of the stories.
Then the First Graders had a Big Book parade for the entire school. Mr. Dan Illiano, principal of Kennedy School, states, “The parade was a way to encourage all the Kennedy kids to read different types of literature. This was a really wonderful project for our First Graders. It fits into our reading curriculum, as well as our present social studies unit of study, Families Around the World.”