Dear Friends!

The Orava Association is pleased to invite you for the fourth time to celebrate the Read Aloud Week which will take place from April 2 - 8, 2005. The main goal of this event is to support communication between the world of adults and children through books and stories. We invite all parents, teachers, grand parents, siblings and other adults to join in this event and to help children discover the world of literature and fairy tales hiding a lot of joy and new learning. We already look forward to receiving the colorful plans and to reading reactions of children to individual questions. We hope you will have many nice moments during this year's Read Aloud Week!

After record number of participating children in Slovakia last year (approximately 7000) we prepared also for this year a new game. This year we would like to remember the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great story teller H. Ch. Andersen. Again this year we cooperated with Danka Facunova from Dolny Kubin who drew the game From one fairy tale into another for younger children. We intentionally chose characters from Andersen's fairy tales for our game. Children will collect diamonds - letters for each task solved.

Copy the plan with fairy tale country and hand it out to children to take home to their parents or other adults who would be reading aloud to them. Children will be meeting various characters from Andersen's tales (but don't tell them that beforehand) and after fulfilling the individual tasks they will receive eight diamonds (letters), that will help them disclose the name of the mysterious man depicted on the book on the plan. For each question answered the child receives one letter. Only the first task is an exception when children receive two letters. The plan is designed into seven parts representing seven days. Each day when someone read aloud to the child for at least 10 - 15 minutes, the child can color one part of the fairy tale journey and answer one task. The goal of the game is to respond to all seven questions and collect all eight letters that make when combined correctly the name of the man depicted in the picture.

For older children and students we prepared also this year the game Draw your story. Classroom that decides to join in this event should first choose together a book that they will read for the duration of one week. Volunteers can take turns reading. It is good to divide the story equally for each day in the week and to give opportunity to students to think and discuss about what they heard. The task of the students is to draw in the form of comics the story read. This way each student will create his or her own comics in which they will depict parts and situations important for them in the story.

If you have your own idea about how to celebrate the Read Aloud Week, great! Let us please know your ideas, events you organized and reactions of your students, children, parents...

At the end of the Read Aloud Week you can ask students to bring the plans and pictures back to school where you can award them with the Certificate of participation in the Read Aloud Week that you can copy on a color paper.

We look forward to hearing your reactions, experiences and ideas!

We wish you many interesting stories read and discussed!