Reading is ‘fun’ damental
Special activities include guest readers, ‘Vocabulary Parade’ and MARS night
Globe Park Elementary’s reading week includes special activities like guest readers and a Vocabulary Parade.
WOONSOCKET — When Globe Park Elementary School scheduled its annual reading week for this week, the school planned to do a lot more than just read books.
Not that reading books isn’t something fun to do just by itself, but Principal Tina Silva wanted to make sure Globe’s students would have plenty of other activities to make reading week even more enjoyable.
So, in addition to finding a few celebrity readers in Globe classrooms, like School Committee Chairman Soren Seale or Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, students, on Tuesday, got to dress up in costumes for the Globe Vocabulary Parade on the recess grounds, and were also scheduled to have MARS night at the school on Wednesday.
“We just decided to make reading week fun,” Silva said while watching her students in their parade Tuesday afternoon. “How do you do that? We incorporated all kinds of literacy and vocabulary activities as part of our reading week celebration.”
As part of the Vocabulary Parade, students and their families had to think about the words students were learning in their classrooms and then come up with a costume to highlight them in the parade. There were some costumes based on nouns like ‘buccaneer’ for a ‘pirate,’ or ‘comeback’ for a ‘New England Patriot.’ The parade also featured adjectives like ‘brawny’ and ‘dazzling,’ important words like ‘gentleman’ and scientific words like ‘oceanography.’
The activities will continue Wednesday night when the school hosts its MARS night, with special activities in math, the arts, reading and science, Silva said. There will even be a concert by the school’s chorus.
“We are going to have a planetarium display and we’ll be teaching the parents some math games they can play with their children,” she said.
Globe paraprofessional Michael Davis once again lined up special readers to stop in at the school’s classrooms like Seale. The school committee member read to students in Shawn Hunter’s Room 2 classroom.
“I enjoy it and I try to do it every year,” Seale said of his reading visit.
“I think it just helps getting other people to read to the kids and I think it helps them to get interested in reading,” he said.
Seale said he read every day when he was in school and still remembers the books he liked in elementary school like “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Curious George.”
Ed Lapierre, a third-grade teacher at the school, said his students were looking forward to this year’s MARS night activities.
“We will have a reading room and room for math games and they will also get to do a science project,” he said.
The students’ parents will also be attending and participating in the MARS night fun, he added: “We really do get a lot of participation, it is a good night.”