Dulwich Book Fair and Cross Cultural Literary Festival
Dulwich Book Fair and Cross Cultural Literary Festival
From 28th to 30th Oct, our school hosted its first ever book week!
Book Fair
The vendors that visited were Shanghai Book Traders and Book Wins. We invited them both because of their good reputation, the excellent range of books they supply and the service quality they provide to international schools.
They both provided a wide range of choice for our students and staff. The book choice on offer covered fiction books as well as nonfiction books. They supplied fiction books covering eight different genres of fiction including adventure, classics, science-fiction, fairy tales, fantasy, humor, history, mystery and graphic novels as well as more than six different types of nonfiction books. These covered the subject areas of biography, science, bridge, history, encyclopedias and psychology amongst others.
From the feedback our vendors provided, we found the joint efforts to promote the book fair between the library and each academic department had paid off.
The vendors said that our students had a certain knowledge of classic books, this is why some pocket classic books were popular amongst some students. Our students are interested in developing their learning ability and mind set, therefore books that help build these skills were popular with our students. Our students were keen to find books that help them to develop their reading ability from their current level to a higher level of literacy.
The book fair received many positive comments from both students and staff. The book fair provides students the opportunity see the most up to date English books and read them!
Cross Cultural Literary Festival
On the 30th October, we organized a Y10 Cross Cultural Literary Festival, which included 16 workshops and a 40 minute performance. The workshops covered a diverse range of literary topics including: writing, drawing, design and literary appreciation. Among 16 speakers, there were 7 teachers and 1 student from our school. Rosa Tang is a Y11 student and was the only student speaker. Her workshop was about Women’s costume and make up in the Tang Dynasty. The workshop showcased an empowered student and proved that as long as she/he has real knowledge in a given field, they will do well. Another touching thing is that a student approached one of our guest speakers and told him that his philosophy talk had solved a problem that had confused him for years!
The performance included poetry recitals, dance, and musical performances. All the performances were led by our students and the event went well. Students discovered they enjoyed performing and received warm support while on the stage. They all stated that they would be willing to be on stage again.
From the initial planning until the end of the event, the book week and literary festival volunteers (comprising of a group of Y11 and Y10 students) contributed their ideas, offered support to guest speakers, designed posters and completed a lot of the paper work. It was an event driven by students for students who all found value of themselves through participating to the event.