Read Grow Inspire - three verbs to unpack for the three word slogan for Book Week this year! I am beginning to think about how to decorate the library, what to put on display and just what tangent to go off on, which is often what I do in preparation for Term 3 Library lessons. Of course there's the shortlisted books to consider too, but they are easier to plan for because hardly any of them come without any teaching notes or ideas online.
READ is quite self explanatory, but what a good chance to explore with children why they read. So often they tell you it is to learn and that is a good reason, but what about to enjoy, to use, to escape!
At my school more emphasis needs to be placed on reading for pleasure. We want children to become life-long readers, children who can not only read, but who choose to read! I worry that some very young learners who are spending so much of their learning time on isolated phonics, do not know why they are doing the worksheets and saying these sounds over and over again. If they are not read to at home and the teachers are saying they don't have time to read picture books or a serial so that their class experiences pleasure from reading, will the students make the connections, will they be inspired to want to read? Why read at all? There are so many other pleasures to pursue.
GROW can stand a much wider interpretation. Simply it means to become larger or greater over a period of time. This could be the child, a plant, a tree, knowledge, confidence... in fact anything that can become bigger or change physically.
It would be fun to explore the origins of the word 'grow'. The Latin root 'cult' means to grow. How many words can you list with that root in them which have something to do with growing...cultivate, culture, horticulture, agriculture... ? How many other words can we list that are synonyms for grow...sprout, bloom, germinate, flourish, flower ... ? All of these words could be leaves of a tree or petals on flowers for a display.
INSPIRE means to fill yourself or someone else with feelings, thoughts, motivation, stimulation or even with the urge to do something creative. How wonderful!
Now of course we could take this literally. Read something...learn something...be inspired to do something like William Kamkwamba the boy from a Malawi village who spent his days in the library during a drought where he read about windmills and figured out how to build one using junkyard scraps. Later he worked out how to use the windmill for irrigation purposes. His story is in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
There will be other biographies telling students about something that the person read about, that later became the inspiration for some invention. Reading picture book biographies will be ideal wide reading for this slogan. Perhaps think about a biography wide-reading contract.
If you take it less literally Read, Grow, Inspire can be translated to mean Read, Connect, Act which is the mantra for Empathy Lab and what we as teachers should be aiming for when choosing books to read to our students. Whichever way you choose to interpret this slogan it allows for plenty of flexibility, creativity and activity. Go for it!
Next... Why did Matt Ottley choose to put a seahorse on the Book Week poster?
A fabulous and thoughtful post - so much to unpack with our students from the 2023 slogan.
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