We had a fantastic day yesterday with lots of our primary students taking part in our Big Read event.
As this year is The National Year of Reading, which is a wide campaign aimed at reigniting a culture of reading for pleasure, particularly among children and young people. We decided to have a day dedicated to reading, writing, and performing poetry slam.
Helping us with our event we were very lucky to have the extremely talented Andy Craven Griffiths, As a poet he has performed most extensively live on stage (Glastonbury, Latitude, BAC) but has also had work broadcast (Radio 1, Radio 4, BBC 2), and printed (poetry journals such as Magma, Ambit). Working with the primary students we had some amazing poetry slam work produced, which were then performed at the end of the session. Alongside Andy some of our own brilliant year ten students worked with the younger ones, giving them fantastic support, advice and encouragement.
Over the course of the day we also had 90 primary students coached and read to by our amazing students, who demonstrated kindness, patience, responsibility, empathy, and teamwork throughout the event, all part of our character values here at Grace Academy Darlaston!
We hope that this event has gone some way to open up the magical word of books and reading.
Thank you to our primaries for attending, our students for supporting and the staff for organising.
The next Big Read is in the planning !
