What Makes a Hero? Dulwich Puxi Festival of Stories 2022

Last week was dedicated to our annual Book Week, the Festival of Stories. The theme of this year’s Festival of Stories was ‘What Makes a Hero?’ and centered around exploring justice through literature. Our collective love of books, stories and literature was on full display last week. Let us now take a look back at all of the incredible things that happened around College for Festival of Stories;

Festival of Stories: A Literary Treat for All
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The children and teachers in Early Years had a super week celebrating our Festival of Stories, superhero-style! On Monday, the College welcomed some of the well-known superheroes, with Spiderman crawling down the front of school. This caused lots of delight and fantastic conversation from our Nursery garden and the spiderweb playground. Batman and Superman were also on-guard around school. This year’s theme in the Early Years was ‘Speak up for Justice’ and through this, the children explored heroes and what it means to be a hero. 

Our stories also came alive through our door decorations, where we transformed the classroom doors into parts of the stories we shared. Toddlers read the story, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’, and the children got involved with collaging the characters and the setting for their door. Nursery have explored the story about ‘Supertato’ and talked about what their superpowers would be. Reception created the beginning, middle and end of the story, ‘The Selfish Crocodile’, where the mouse was a superhero and saved the crocodile from his toothache. 

We shared many other stories across the week, developing our love of reading, including a visit to the yurt to listen to stories and today we curled up with some hot chocolate while we listened to some stories together. We also had the opportunity to visit the Book Fair to buy some new books to share at home. We ended the week with our dress up day and the children’s costumes looked amazing. They were so excited to talk about the books the characters were from or show us their books they’d brought in. We saw very creative pieces and some great ideas for sustainability.

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Last week’s ‘Festival of Stories’ was a real literary treat for the eyes and ears, involving everything from book doors into other worlds, stories about justice, paired reading and simply finding pleasure in the love of a good book. The excitement and buzz that I experienced in the Book Fair was extraordinary and confirmed to me how much our students in the Primary School simply love reading! Students have not only been reading but writing; creating exciting comics and producing their own collaborative masterpieces, written by a selection of students from Year 1 to Year 6. Students have also had opportunities to read to one another from across the school, with our Year 6 students being lucky enough to take part in a wonderful transition event with our Senior school involving the famous author, Mark Grist.

We had teachers and students alike sharing their favourite stories, reacting to different videos and putting on their own amusing voices, culminating in a wonderful ‘snuggle up and read’ session in classrooms, sharing our favourite literary works with a warming cup of delicious hot chocolate. Seeing the students dressed up, celebrating their love of reading together and talking so passionately about books and stories has been a real highlight of mine and has reminded me about one of my favourite quotes by the esteemed English writer, Samuel Johnson: “A writer only begins a good book. A reader finishes it”.

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The best books always stay with you, and fond memories of last week’s Festival of Stories will always stay with our students and staff at Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi. It was a pleasure to see the abundance of flourishing reading activities taking place across Senior School. With the theme of this year’s Festival of Stories being justice, below are some of the events displayed how we celebrated in Senior School:

Dimity Powell - Author Assembly
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Ms Roser, our College Head Librarian, invited Dimity Powell, an author who creates children’s novels and picture books to give a discussion to our students in Year 7 to Year 12. Her inspiration lies in the following vision: “I want my words to matter; for my picture books to remain in children’s hearts like well-loved tunes and my stories to resonate integrity. I thrive on delivering more than expected, accepting challenges I have to stand on tippy toes to reach, and celebrating the profound art of story. And I don’t plan on stopping any time soon”. The students were involved in a rich, stimulating discussion on what is involved in the process of creating a book and how to go about it, as a career.

Paired Readings
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It was a pleasure to see Year 8 students reading to Year 3 children on Wednesday. The students designed their own paired reading material and relished in the joys of reading to one another. The students also incorporated the activity by including some exciting visual aids such as VIPER bookmarks, and book review activities. The whole experience was extremely rewarding and became a moment to connect and build relationships; and to align with our primary students.

House Costume Competition
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Under the Festival of Stories theme of justice, students and teachers were invited dress up on Friday as their favourite hero that represents justice to them. A costume parade was held in the College restaurant with Mr Polgaze and Mr Walker decided on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th place costume winners, who gained House points for their efforts. It was wonderful to see such interesting and creative interpretations on what justice means to them!

Mark Grist Workshop
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On Wednesday, students were given the chance to channel their expression by creating justice themed poetry of their own entitled ‘The World Is Ours’ - an anthology of work collaborating with 8 participating Dulwich Colleges on the same project.

Senior School students in Year 7 also aligned with our primary Year 6 students to express their ideas with the aim of producing an anthology with ex secondary English teacher and now internationally acclaimed UK poet Mark Grist. Our Senior and Primary students created their own poetry that reflected a clear sense of self compassion, empathy and humour, whilst also collaborating in teams to formulate poems from single lines to finished pieces. Students shared their excitement, collaborated together, and performed their hearts out in groups!

It was fantastic to see students really challenging themselves to write innovative and original examples of poetry based on their own worlds; considering their desires on being treated fairly, odes to their loved ones and projections of the self. It was a truly memorable event for our students and staff. A huge thank you to Mark Grist for delivering such a successful workshop.

Book Mastermind with Year 7-9
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Students also collaborated in their Year groups by being involved in a reading challenge in lessons. Students were grilled on famous book titles, solved tricky picture puzzles and then got together to recreate a story of their perfect world.

All in all, it was truly a Festival of Words to be remembered!