MONA Primary School last week hosted a reading fair that inspired students, teachers and parents to make reading a regular part of their approach to learning.

The reading fair saw the coming together of several different stakeholders to view displays and performances put together by the talented Mona school family.

Teacher and organiser of the fair, Janet Dean, said the event was meant to present a fun approach to how children learn to read.

“The fair was actually geared towards a hands-on, more interactive approach to reading,” she said.

An opening ceremony saw students engaging in dance, poetry, singing, and drama. Members of Parliament Andre Hylton and Mikael Phillips, as well as author and publisher Kellie Magnus, engaged the students in storytelling sessions. The International Youth Fellowship (IYF) was also in attendance and put on a puppet show for the youngsters.

Dean explained that the fair was organised with the Jamaica 50 celebrations as its theme.

“[The idea was] that with it being Jamaica 50, a nation is on a mission, so we need to get literate and we need to get everybody involved,” she said.

She explained that with this in mind, each grade was given a theme from which they worked with their teachers and parents to come up with a presentation for the fair.

Grade one’s theme was ‘Response to literature’; grade two, ‘Games and puzzles’; grade three, ‘Literacy through the arts’; grade four, ‘Letter writing’; grade five, ‘Reading through mathematics’; and grade six, ‘Poems’. The fair also presented reading through sports with the physical education department demonstrating different techniques through a football game.

The reading fair was also used to launch a hop-scotch game that the school has developed to teach grade one students phonics and language arts, and reading to other groups.

“Reading can be fun; learning is fun. So, for example, for a teacher who would want to reinforce her lesson through a game approach, we drew hop-scotch games to bring in lessons about blends, consonants and vowels,” Dean said.

She said the hope is to have the hop-scotch game more professionally drawn and painted so teachers can incorporate it in their regular lesson planning.

“It is really about getting persons to be more interested in reading and to see if we can get teachers to move away from the ‘chalk and talk’, because our children are more computer literate, they are into games, so if we can get them to be stimulated by games, and by making puzzles and so on, we will get them to learn and read more,” the grade two teacher said.

Dean said the school is also interacting with 35 remedial students from Penwood High School who also participated in the reading fair. She said the students are all non-readers, who by engaging in reading programmes and activities at Mona Primary school, will improve their own literacy level.

She said her department will be seeking to help Penwood High develop a reading programme of its own.

“In much the same way that Penwood High came and interacted with a primary school, that is the type of relationship we want to build. If a school needs learning techniques, we would like to go into their school and tell them how it is done and help to build their literacy programme. That is what our next mission is,” she said.