Printable 30 Day Ab Challenge

International Literacy Day: 30 Day Challenge

Since 1967, International Literacy Day has been celebrated around the world to promote literacy as a fundamental human right. Literacy allows people to communicate, to develop their knowledge and fulfil their potential. So, how can you celebrate International Literacy Day, and promote literacy in your classroom? Here’s a 30-day challenge for students with lots of International Literacy Day activities. 

30-day challenge ideasBook swap. Ask your students to bring in a book and take part in a book exchange with their classmates.  Literacy scavenger hunt. Give your students a novel each in English along with a list of words to find within the pages, for example an adjective that begins with b, or a noun that begins with ch, or a verb that begins with p. Scrabble activity. Put seven letters up on the board and ask your students to make as many words as they can from the letters.  Write a book review. Ask your students to write a book review of the last book that they read, or a favourite book from childhood.  Literary character costumes. Get your students to come to class dressed as their favourite literary character and see if their classmates can recognise them.  Write an Instagram post. Students have to choose a photo from their camera roll and write an Instagram caption to go along with the image. Read a poem aloud. Poetry is designed to be spoken aloud, so why not start off class by reading a short poem aloud to your students? Find inspiration and browse poems by theme at the Poetry Foundation. Writing activity. Prompts are useful for getting students inspired. Ask students to write about their favourite day of last summer. Recipe research. Ask your students to research a recipe online (in English) for their favourite dish or dessert. In order to show they can follow a recipe, they then have to make the dish and bring it in for a potluck class picnic. Write a still life short story. Bring in an assortment of everyday objects, e.g. a cup, a photograph, a paintbrush etc. Place the objects together on your desk and ask students to write a story involving at least three of the objects. Correct a classmate’s work. Ask your students to swap their written work with a classmate (maybe their still life short stories) and correct any errors that their classmate has made. Write a chain story. Fold a piece of paper and then write an opening sentence to start your students off. Pass the paper around the class, getting your students to add a sentence each. Visit the library together. Take your students down to your school library or local library. You could do a book scavenger hunt, where students have to find a book with a female narrator, or find a book set in the 1800s, or find a book set in Australia. Hold a spelling bee. Come up with a list of words and then hold a spelling bee, going round the class and asking students to spell your chosen words. If they get it wrong, they’re eliminated from the competition. The last student standing is the winner! Silent reading. Collect some English books/texts for your students and leave a book or a passage on each student’s desk. Start your class off with five minutes of silent reading. Once the five minutes are up, students can ask you about any words or phrases they didn’t understand. Write and perform a short play. Split your class into small groups, and then give each group a writing prompt for a short play. Give them ten minutes to come up with a short scene, and another five minutes to practise. Then get each group to perform their scene for their classmates.  Do a crossword. If you have a smartboard, you can do an online crossword with your students. If not, bring in photocopies of a simple crossword and work out the clues as a class. Draw a comic strip. Give your students a short conversation or scenario and a blank comic strip. Ask them to draw a comic strip to match the text. Play the alphabet game. Put your students into pairs for the alphabet game, where they hold a conversation. Each sentence needs to start with the following letter of the alphabet, e.g. ‘After we had lunch, we went out for a walk.’ ‘But weren’t you tired?’   Create a word wall. Have a stack of A4 sheets handy, and every time a new word comes up in class, write it in big letters and stick it on the wall. It will help your students to recall recently learned vocabulary. Play a phonics game. Get your students to sort words by vowel sound, asking them to group words with the same vowel sound, even when the spelling is different, for example lake, bait and eight, or toad, bode and rowed. Work on key words. This short activity will help your students to master key question words. Read along. Give your students a text which lets them follow along while you read.  Simile matching. Choose five common similes and cut them in half. Ask your class to match the simile halves – you might be surprised at some of the combinations they come up with! Play 20 questions. Think of a famous writer, then play 20 questions with your students to see if they can guess who you’re thinking of. Write a fan email. Ask students to write a fan email to their favourite writer. They might even receive a reply!  Create a word search. Create a word search activity for your students, where words are hidden within a square of random letters. You could use the words from your word wall. Alliterative adjectives. Challenge your students to come up with an adjective for themselves that starts with the same letter as their first name. Colour synonyms. Assign students a primary colour, and ask them to research as many shades of this colour and the names of these various shades. Challenge your students to come up with as many as possible!  Running dictation. Write a short paragraph and put it up on the classroom wall. Then, split your learners into pairs, with one as the writer and one as the runner. The runner needs to run to the paragraph, memorise the first sentence, run back and dictate it to the other student, who writes it down. Roles are then reversed. You can have prizes for the fastest and for the most accurate. 

Do you have any good activities for International Literacy Day? Share your ideas in the comments, and let us know if you and your students completed the 30-day challenge!