The second annual Agincourt Festival of Literacy has created a real buzz around the School this week. The children have all become even more avid readers and we have some aspiring authors too.

Literacy Week started with the Book Café, which ran in the hall all day on Monday. Each class was given the opportunity to visit the café, where our staff and parent volunteers shared a few old favourites and some lovely new books with them. The children were all extremely well-behaved and sat and listened to the stories attentively. A huge variety of cakes and biscuits, all provided by the staff, were equally popular with the children.

Photos of the Book Café are available on our FlickR website

On Tuesday the staff and children all came to school dressed as their favourite book characters. After a very colourful assembly the Nursery children set off on their visit to Monmouth Library. The library team talked about the importance of books and shared some of their favourites with the children.

Following on from the successful start to the week the children took part in a great many activities on the literary theme. Year 1 have written some impressive stories about ‘Handa’ and some visiting parents found it difficult to believe that they had been written by 5 and 6 year old children. The children have also learned some swahili proverbs and printed them onto fabric. Year 2 have been collating information about the Great Barrier Reef for their non-fiction books. They were all extremely keen to tell me about their amazing discoveries and have definitely added to my own knowledge about sea creatures. Reception have been categorising animals by the way they move and have been working hard on their sounding out their captions.

To finish off the week the Year 2 children became ‘Reading Buddies’ and visited the Nursery class to read to the children. New friendships were made and we will be repeating this initiative again soon.