February 2020: The Infinity School, Noida Extension.

The Infinity School—a K12 school in Noida extension, announced a range of activities (under author spotlight week) every month, to develop critical reading and comprehension skills while exposing children to different children's book authors and genres of reading. New theme and author are chosen every month. His/her biography & best works are featured in The Infinity School's library.

In a society obsessed with gadgets and playbox, book-reading is one of the under-appreciated & neglected hobbies. However, storybooks are often enjoyed as an escape from boredom, even though it plays a crucial role in shaping a child's imagination, language comprehension & emotional intelligence. Why does Captain Hook look like that? What if Snow White hadn't eaten the apple? Answering such questions and reflecting on the plot has ample cognitive benefits for children.

Considering this, the school chose stories as a medium to inculcate early literacy, reading habits and nurture comprehension skills in children like the ability to draw conclusions, make inferences, structure sentences, summarise, analyse contexts & characters, and compare plots. They've four dedicated reading periods plus a library period every week, wherein teachers arrange fun reading activities (trivia, picture composition, storytelling, etc.) to engage children with books.

December was the month of fables, and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book was selected for explaining complicated emotions & inculcating values (like caring, harmony, unity, sharing, courage, etc.) using animals in an anthropomorphic way.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was the book of the month, complementing the theme for January—fiction & fairy tales. The book was read aloud to develop phonic & phonological awareness in preschoolers, and held many life-changing lessons for them (E.g., Life can be much more 'muchier' if one follows their dream). Kindergartners put their observation & organisational skills into practice while segregating real and fictional characters and objects, whereas grades I to V spun their own fairy tales around self-designed characters. Fiction writing strengthened their creativity, communication, vocabulary, sentence structuring & cohesion.

February showcased Charles Dicken's classics, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist & Great Expectations on the bookshelves, with prose narrative fiction (among the most popular and widely consumed literary genre), as the theme. Children read Dicken's novels/short stories, and participated in character sketching, paraphrasing, creating short stories from images, etc., to test their vocabulary, comprehension, composition, and writing skills. The library will be featuring other famous authors & interesting themes throughout the year.

The school also runs an international level-wise reading programme (starting from kindergarten) through in-class libraries. As a part of the programme, each student is issued age-appropriate books for leisure reading at home. Even outsiders can avail The Infinity School's free library membership to introduce early reading habits in their children. Details of the library membership programme are available on the school's official website.