Davao City (23 July) -- City Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio led the storytelling for Davao school children at SM City Davao Entertainment Center in time for the National Children's Book Day celebrated nationwide on July 20, 2010.
The mayor who came with her daughter Sharky took time out of her busy schedule of reading a story to children coming from 8 public elementary schools of mixed grades level from 1 to 6.
The story entitled "Emang Engkantada at ang Tatlong Haragan" is about how kids could also help protect the environment. The storytelling was accompanied by live performance adopted from the story portrayed by selected school children depicting a healthy environment and later destroyed by people.
In her brief message, Mayor Sara said she is pursuing her advocacy on school children learning not only to read but of reading and comprehension. The stories we read to our children are good source of information where they could pick some lessons.
"It is important that at a young age kids already know how to read with comprehension because I would like to share to them my experience that at age 3, I already know how to read and I want them to be taught early," she said.
She said part of her advocacy is for the teachers in the preschool under the supervision of the city government where to undergo seminar on how to teach reading to the kids.
In partnership with some private schools here our preschool teachers underwent seminar on this and I would expect them to teach what they learned to their respective students.
She said considering that the Davao City School Board is under her supervision they make sure that education for the kids will be given focus and this will be part of her priorities.
SM Davao mall manager Lynette Lopez said the storytelling is part of SM Cares project which was done simultaneously in 34 malls nationwide. The event was held in coordination with the National Book Development Board, Vibal Publishing, Inc., Department of Education and the Department of Social Welfare and Development.
She said corporate-wide SMs tenants numbered to 12,000 with 25,000 employees plus 3 million shoppers nationwide, they will continue to embark on projects inline with their corporate social responsibility and this includes among others activities that would encourage children to read.
"Every third Tuesday of July they will hold regular storytelling for the Davao kids. "This is our way of encouraging kids to love reading and welcome them to the wonderful world of books," she said.
Meanwhile teachers from the Magallanes Elementary School also joined the event to support their students who rendered a number on smart reading. They were trained following a specialized reading program.
Teacher Alona Tomboy who handles storytelling and Readers Theater said their school has organized the Communication Arts where this program is offered by the school during summer. It is a workshop open to students for both private and public schools of Davao City. "And we had a good number of enrollees last summer," she said.
In their school alone, she said are 400 pupils trained under ComArts mostly belonging to the honors class. These pupils are taught the right pronunciation, intonation, accent, phonetics and others.
She said it really needs discipline and focus and these kids learn fast as they too are excited to join in competition. And because of their ability, talent and performance they won in contests either on team reading, theater reading and readers reading.
"Exposing children this early is of their advantage and it gives them better opportunity especially that they had developed their self-confidence," she said.
She also said that the school reinforced the reading habit of their pupils by allocating more time on reading. Every Wednesdays pupils for both the morning and afternoon sections are given 30 minutes more for reading session. The Magallanes Elementary School has 6,000 pupils enrolled this school year.
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