World Book Day was BIG at BISA!

March 2, 2018

World Book Day is a big event for educators across the world, and BISA loves to get in on the action!

It was a school-wide reading and literature extravaganza with everyone from pre-creche to Year 13 getting involved. Enjoy our articles below and find out what we got up to while we celebrated our favourite books, authors and genres.

Pre-Creche to Year 2: Fairytale Fun at Braeburn Infant School

Children from Braeburn Infant School and our Kisongo campus collaborated at the Infant School for a fun-filled, fairytale feast! Beginning their day with our traditional World Book Day Breakfast, we admired the inventive costumes and characters that filled the playground. Our home learning project had been a family collaboration in making a castle, and everyone rose to the occasion. Everywhere we looked, there were creative castles made from recycled materials, all lovingly crafted by our families!

Pre-Creche, Creche and FS1 spent their day focusing on one of their favourite traditional tales - The Three Little Pigs! They watched a puppet show of the story, helping to huff and puff and blow the houses down, cheering for the little pigs and booing the big bad wolf!

Afterwards they took part in all kinds of fun activties relating to the story including making little pig cupcakes, wolf puppets and testing out the different types of houses using a 'wolf-shaped hairdryer'. The children could all tell the story off by heart and thoroughly enjoyed their day!

FS2, Year 1 and Year 2 also had a brilliant day fostering a really love for traditional tales. They spent the day turning straw into gold for a greedy king, designing bridges for billy goats, baking ginger bread man, creating our own traditional settings and story mapping on balloons!

A special thank you to all the parents for joining us on the day and really getting into the spirit of things with the costumes and family collaboration on the castle project!

Year 3 to 13: A Mixed Bag of Book-Related Goodies in Kisongo!

At our Kisongo Campus, Year 3, 4 and 5 started their day with coffee, cakes and characters, giving everyone a chance to admire the creative costumes of our Primary students. With costumes ranging from Hermione Granger to a bookworm, the Primary students showed their love of literature through their outfit choices. Classroom activities and rotations centred around a range of different books including Mwenye Hadithi's animal tales, fables, French comic books and sporty stories. Well done to everyone for all the effort they put in!

Meanwhile, for Year 6 to 13, the theme was the Victorian era (1837- 1901).

The morning kicked off with a character parade at the amphitheatre where the clear winner was Jasmine Chadha who came very cleverly dressed as a portrait of Queen Victoria. The Secondary audience was thrilled with her outfit and whooped and applauded wildly. Charis Pulei was also greeted enthusiastically with her suffragette costume tthat looked like it had been lifted straight out of Victorian England.

Not to be left out, our headteacher, Mrs. Rogers dressed as a chimney sweep and gave a detailed account of what it was like to be a chimney sweep at that time.

The students took part in a variety of different activities over the morning including looking at the Colonisation of Africa, key events such as the abolition of slavery (1834- which was just before the Victorian era) and the building of the Mombasa- Ugandan railway line; Victorian Inventions; Victorian Fashion and Entertainment; The Jack The Ripper Trials and Victorian Melodrama.

The year 10s and 11s looked at a book called the Description of the Correct Method of Waltzing by Thomas Wilson. Many fictional books (especially romantic fiction) based on the victorian era, usually describe one or two characters waltzing. We thought it would be fun to learn how to waltz ourselves.

Miss Lulu and Frank from Ibuka dance, were the Victorian Waltz dance instructors. They gave each group session a different dance routine to learn and perfect in an hour and fifteen minutes. They split the groups into couples and taught them the 3-step, 8-step dance and poses. They were also taught how to enter into a ball room, and the mannerism expected during a dance.

A particular highlight was the Sherlock Holmes and Forensic Science activity. Our year 6 and 7 students can confidently claim to be super detectives. Their challenge on World Book Day was to travel back in time to Victorian London and be a member of the 'Baker Street Boys' - a group of children street children that Sherlock Holmes would rely upon to help him solve crimes. Armed with their equipment, they analysed a murder crime scene. They donned their gloves, so that they did not leave any extra finger prints or disturb any evidence, measured distances, found footprints and fingerprints. Magnifying glasses were a great hit. It was not all fun and games, they recorded evidence but more importantly, they drew conclusions. To challenge themselves further, they had to decide what happens next, looking at forensic investigation.
As a collective, they challenged each other on whether their conclusions were realistic.

What a wonderful World Book Day! Enjoy our video slideshow of all our incredible costumes and activities!