This year’s International Literacy Day topic is “Teaching and learning during the COVID-19 period and beyond.” Students in grades 5-9 will be participating in the project.

“The Literacy Day project is extremely relevant,” notes Svetlana Feshchenko, who teaches English language and serves as coordinator for the English Language subjects cycle. “During the mass lock-down, people all over the world asked themselves: Which distance learning methods are most effective and how can we properly position our students’ work in the context of global and national pandemic measures? Students in grades 5-8 will be searching for answers to these questions.”

Ninth grader Polina Guryanova (section 9M1) explains: “In our presentations to the students, we told them about the importance of education in the modern world and discussed how studies went during the 4^th quarter when we all were working from home. In the final stage we will be assessing the project results of students in grades five and six.”

This year students will spend two weeks working on their Literacy Day projects. Our 7^th and 8^th graders will create posters on the topic of alternative educational resources for distance learning. Students in the 5^th and 6^th grades will play an alliteration game, thinking up sentences in English where each word starts with one of the letters in the word “literacy.”

“International Literacy Day is a traditional event in our school,” notes ILS Principal Olga Shevchenko. “This year is most unusual for students all around the world, as children everywhere had to quickly reorient towards different educational resources and adapt the available formats to specific classes. In addition, UNESCO, of which ILS in an affiliated school, proposed a highly appropriate topic for this year: Teaching and learning during the COVID-19 period and beyond. We will be very interested to see how our students deal with the task and what alternative resources they suggest.”