Why World Book Day? What’s it all about at Pollington Preschool?
WE love WORLD BOOK DAY so much so that we’ve had a full week of immersing ourselves in our favourite story- this year our tribe have gone elephant crazy and looked at everyone’s favourite patchwork elephant Elmer! All our children have been surrounded by love and warmth through colourful activity, exploring the many concepts in the story through play.
World Book Day can often be misunderstood as a parent’s opportunity to showcase their own ability for their child to come dressed in the best costume. Parental pressure to perform can often showcase some of the most amazing costume efforts from home, so a big well done to those parents! However, whether a homemade costume where little hands have helped or shop bought it doesn’t really matter for the children as the importance of experience is further deep rooted as they begin to immerse themselves in the character of a favourite story. The opportunity to be someone or something different is exciting!
By dressing up, children explore feelings of belonging and culture, a sense of community envelopes them as they participate in a day of celebration together. The opportunity to dress up and explore feelings of pride, sometimes shyness and even embarrassment gives the children a truly unique experience and for most children year on year this grows into something special as they begin to relish preparations for the day, excitedly planning who they want to be the next year. Their opportunity of creative growth is beginning.
Being able to participate and identify as a character enables the children to explore their imaginations and begin to make links creatively, super important for creative thinking and writing and being able to identify and understand parts of their own personality traits with fictional and non-fictional characters.
This year we have focused our world book week with the use of props and physical development. We didn’t ask our children to dress up specifically as we didn’t want to put our families under pressure and often for very young children they refuse to wear the outfits anyway. However, many of our children have enjoyed wearing bright colours and our community feeling began right here, as we made links together between the similar colours everyone was wearing and the patchwork elephant.
Our football class with KIXX has supported our physical development this week, as links to early handwriting are secured in good physical development. The use of props in our story telling support the children in their imaginative narratives, as they see the characters in the book come to life. Making coloured paper clip chains have supported problem solving and early number and we have done so much more.
It is fun for young children to dress up but what world book day really brings is the community together.
We find our own place in the community and begin to understand how we are all truly unique on days like these-just like Elmer!
As such a forward facing profession you could be forgiven for not understanding the hard work and dedication that goes on behind the scenes by our tribe. Every term we sit and make plans that support elements of safeguarding, staff development and children's development and working with you guys parents to support our goals in supporting all children to make the best progress. Many of these include having high expectations for our staff team.
Today is a day that we at preschool dread. Every year it gets harder and harder to let our ‘Adventurer’s’ leave our place to belong. We spend all year having the MOST exciting adventures together in anticipation of this transition time. We grow and learn together as we prepare to ultimately watch them get ready to set sail ‘into the unknown’ and their next set of adventures. Each and every-one of them leaving an imprint on our hearts. 
