Last week I attended my first seminar lesson, in which we shared our personal experiences in reading, since the very beginning we started to meet letters until today. In my case, one of my favourite films (those that we watch and watch thousand times), the book lover Matilda, was a really strong influence in my promotion of reading. I remember one sequence of the film in which she is going to the library and takes lots of books in a wheelbarrow for reading them at home. Since the first time I watched that, I decided that I wanted to be like her and have hundreds and hundreds of books surrounding me; and I was so lucky, because my mother also loves reading, and she bought me many books and decided to take me to the library twice a week: on Wednesday, to choose a book and read it there; and on Saturday, to play games that some monitors prepared to work on the promotion of reading.
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As I am sure that, as current and future teachers, we should encourage our students and kids to read and show them how many benefits reading has, I would like to share with you the two activities we carried out at the library that I liked the most and I believe that they were useful on promoting us to read:
On the one hand, the “Making a story up”, an activity that consisted on playing in groups with different labels (in my case, ten labels, but in depends on the age and number of kids) with single words. We had to discuss about them to create a story in which those words were all included and produce our own book by writing the story on big cardboards and decorating them with drawings that represented the situations described. Then, the books were kept on a special shelf on the library to let everyone read them. I loved that activity, as the process of making the stories up was really fun, the stories were really interesting due to the imagination we have when we are kids, and they promoted not just reading, but creativity, working in groups and other social abilities, linguistic and artistic skills, and furthermore the satisfaction of having your own book “published” and read by other people.
On the other hand, and related to some posts written two weeks ago, “The storytelling theatre”. In this game, each monitor was in charge of one group of kids who were going to become storytellers and represent their corresponding story, using puppets, in a little theatre, in which we were hidden behind. For that, the monitor chose who was going to be each character and we read the story all together, each kid their lines, and practising with the puppets. Finally, the stories were represented in the little theatre, so that we became storytellers but also enjoyed the other stories.
I hope you find those activities interesting, and it would be great if you are encouraged to share your own personal experiences in reading or interesting activities you know for the promotion of reading.
Thank you for your visit! 
Hi Rocío!
I like a lot your post. It has a really inspiring title. In my case, when a was a child, Matilda was also one of my favourite films. It was really surprising for me, to know that Roald Dahl (the author that my group and I investigated and presented) was the author of the book. I think that Matilda has great characteristics that can make her an attractive character for children, because she is sweet, adventurer, defenceless and even she has powers!
Some partners explained in their posts ideas related to the power that families have with children, that is, their relevance on developing a reading habit on kids. Concretely, you and your mother are a great example of these ideas. I think your visits to the library twice a week, were something fantastic. In this way, you show us that this is not something exclusive of schools and teachers. Not at all, it would be interesting that schools increase these kind of activities with their students.
Finally, I want to thank you for the library activities that you described to us so in detailed. I love both of them, specially the second one (The storytelling theatre) , where children can develop communicative skills, literature background, imagination and lose fears.
Hello Rocio!
)
First of all I would like to thank you for your post because I really liked reading it! With the title you caught my attention in just one second, and I wanted to read what it was about.
I have also seen Matilda many, many times, and it is very impressive to see how a very little girl goes by herself to a library to take so many books to read them.
I have to say that I was also very lucky because both my parents and my older sister like to read, and they have passed this love to literature to me. In my case, my parents were the first ones that encourage me to read because when I was not able to do it by my own, they were the ones that read to me as many times as I wanted to hear the stories. (But just that you know, at the end they decided to buy the films because they were tired of doing it. Just joking
Later on, I remember going with my older sister to a mobile library, a bus, every Thursday. I really enjoyed those times, because apart from enjoying the time reading, it was also a moment to share this hobby with my sister.
To finish with my comment, and related with what I just said, I also liked with what you told us about going to the library on Saturdays and playing games related with reading. I think that it is a great idea what they did there, and I hope these kind of things could develop in the future.