“World Book Day, also known as World Book and Copyright Day, is celebrated across the globe on 23 April every year to recognise and promote the benefit of reading books, publishing and copyright..” (Deka, 2021)

On 23 April 2021, students of the GIIS East Coast campus celebrated World Book Day 2021 who came to school dressed up as their favourite book or movie character to commemorate this international day. Students from Kindergarten to grade 9 came in with a myriad of colours with some interesting stories. They spoke about who their favourite character is and why they dressed up like him/her.

Students of IB PYP had a wonderful virtual session with an author, Ms Noella Menon. She is a children’s book author and illustrator and has been selected as Feature Writer of The Singapore Women’s Weekly, Young Parent, IndiaSe and Femina. Ms Noella has also won as the Best Script Writer of the Best Animated Short at the Hollywood Film Festival.

Ms Noella Menon shared her experience on what caused her to love reading, writing and how she successfully learnt to publish her books. She showed us excerpts from her books and even had a chance of hearing her read a few lines. As an award-winning voice-over artist, she also shared how intonation and voice modulation work wonders when telling a story.

We were also privileged to have Ms Nurul Husna Ghali, an associate librarian from the Children & Teens team in the National Library Board (NLB) as our guest speaker. She works with primary and secondary schools to build and sustain strong reading cultures through outreach programmes such as Book Buzzes, creates literary packages such as Suggested Reading Lists, for students. She connected with students from Grades 1 to 9 virtually to share with them the importance of reading.  

As Dr Seuss rightly said, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more things you learn, the more places you’ll go!” We, at GIIS East Coast, like to encourage every student to ignite the love for reading every single day.