Port Hueneme : Pupils Parade Their Interest in Reading as Book Week Ends

Two dozen first-graders wearing paper-bag masks “roared their terrible roar, gnashed their terrible teeth, and rolled their terrible eyes” on the blacktop behind Richard Bard Elementary School, acting out Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Thirteen classrooms, totaling 400 children from kindergarten through the sixth grade, each turned a book they have read into a parade or a skit Friday as the grand finale of their National Book Week activities.

During the week, students listened to a poetry reading, wrote letters to U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, and congregated on the schoolyard lawn at lunch to hear stories read by parents.

The week’s activities “get the parents involved,” which is one goal of the new literature-based curriculum in California public schools, said Sue Measures, a reading specialist.

Last year, students began reading “really good literary works” rather than textbooks, said Principal Debbie DeSmeth. It was the first time the school participated in National Book Week, she said.

In October, each classroom chose a book its students liked, then made costumes fashioned to look like story characters and practiced parading on the playground. The older grades selected from books they read as part of their curriculums; younger children had books read to them.

“St. George and the Dragon,” a folk tale retold by Margaret Hodges, was the story chosen for the parade by a third-grade class.

In the re-enactment, children rolled out a cardboard palace built on a utility cart. A pint-sized prince with an aluminum-foil sword battled with a dragon--another boy wearing a green and yellow felt suit and a huge green paper tail with black scales.

The audience squealed with laughter as the narrator announced that the prince and a princess--wearing a white satin dress--married and lived happily ever after.

Measures and DeSmeth were pleased that one class had chosen a non-fiction work as its favorite book.

“Life Cycle of the Whale” “tells true facts about where they live, how they travel and what they eat,” a second-grade narrator said of the book by Paula Z. Hogan.

Besides sparking interest in books, the new reading curriculum attempts to integrate science, math and social studies into the reading program, DeSmeth said.

A group of first-graders wearing cat masks made of paper plates and yarn marched in a circle chanting from Wanda Gag’s “Millions of Cats”: “Cats here, cats there, cats and kittens everywhere. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats.”