GIIS SMART Campus hosted the Interschool Weave-a-Tale competition in January 2019 that saw participation from 70 students from 5 different schools. The participants displayed great storytelling skills in front of a large audience that comprised of students, teachers and parents.

The contest was open to Kindergarten to Grade 5 students and the participating schools were - GIIS Mountbatten, GIIS East Coast, GIIS SMART Campus, NPS and Yuva Bharti. The contest was held separately for Kindergarten and Grade 1-5 students.

Weave-a-Tale for Grades 1 -5

For Grade 1-5 students, the distinguished audience comprised Ms Melissa Maria, Principal of SMART Campus, esteemed judges, parents and teachers. The competition started off with a welcome song by the choir Weave-a-Tale for Grades 1-5 students was attended by.

The judging panel comprised of Mrs Vandana Aggarwal, well-known writer and citizen archivist at the National Library Board and Ms Pooja Singh, a professional storyteller with years of experience in conducting storytelling workshops and sessions in Hindi and English.

There were two categories, individual and the group. Participants of both the categories enthralled the audience with their narrative skills and delightful oratory prowess. The young storytellers in their creative costumes used a variety of props to make their stories interesting and presentable. The contestants were judged on their content, fluency, creativity, time-management, pronunciation, performance and delivery. Each story concluded with a moral, highlighting different values of life.

The contest had 5 levels and a new round, impromptu round, was introduced in the individual category this year. In this round, contestants were asked to narrate a story based on a prop assigned to them 15 minutes before the narration.

Three new awards were given for the Best Entertainer, Best Narrator and Best Expressionist, and these went to the contestants from GIIS SMART Campus, GIIS East Coast Campus and NPS, respectively.

The prizes were given away by the honourable, judges, Mrs Vandana Agarwal and Mrs Pooja Singh, Mr Pramod Tripathi, Asst. Director Academic Quality Assurance, and Mr Rajiv Katyal, Country Director, Singapore operations, GIIS.

The competition was also streamed live on Youtube for the benefit of parents who could not make it for the performance.

List of winners for Grades 1 – 5:

Weave-a-Tale for Kindergarten

Weave-a-tale competition for kindergarten was held on the same day.

There were total 16 participants from GIIS Mountbatten, GIIS SMART Campus, Yuvabharathi International School and NPS International School.

All the stories narrated by young participants conveyed moral values to the audience.  It was a good opportunity for kindergarten students to improve their confidence, develop imagination, learn the art of communication and express with emotions. Each child narrated with immense confidence. Listening to different stories helped children imagine the characters, places, plot etc.

Kindergarten Weave-a-Tale was also attended by a few parents who were overwhelmed to see their little ones performing on the stage. Stories revolved around values like controlling anger, helping each other, a friend in need is a friend indeed, encouragement helps achieve goals, greed is a vice and so on. The confident kids knew all the stories in detail.

To break the monotony and make the session fun for the kids, teachers conducted various games between the performances. The games were based on classical stories and famous characters.

The Weave-a-Tale competition made an attempt to instil the art of story narration among the students and helped retain the tradition of storytelling along with strengthening listening skills among kids. The competition succeeded in its objective to encourage students to bring out the story-teller in them by using imagination and creativity.