Visit to Expo Filnel "An encounter with books and reading".

Last weekend the Expo Filnel – Educational and Cultural Festival “An encounter with books and reading” took place in the Parque Los Aviadores shopping mall, Aragua state, Venezuela. When I received the digital flyer I did not hesitate to go, so on Saturday I attended with my daughter. The expo was located throughout the central hallway, but the first thing you encountered when entering the mall, so it did not go unnoticed. The only part I didn’t enter was the workshop and conference room.

The first thing I went through was the exhibitors’ area where there were different bookstores offering their products and promoting reading, since there were all kinds of books for sale and materials for drawing and other things, as well as two University Institutes.

Further on, there were two more stands, one belonged to a painting school and the other exhibited different works made by elementary school students, stories, comics and books. In this stand, I stayed for a while looking at the different works, all of them were very beautiful and creative. The truth is that as a teacher I wanted to be inspired by new creative writing strategies that I can use with my students.

Next was an interactive area, here were the educational games, from chess, jenga, rubik’s cube, jump rope and other games.

The only one my daughter wanted to try was the rubik’s cube, she has one at home and she learned to solve it pretty fast, so we went over and the lady who attended us told her to choose the one she liked the most and that she could sit on the blanket on the floor. What my daughter didn’t realice, because she was sitting with her back to the TV, was that they were playing a video to teach her how to assemble the bucket. Of course, as she already knows it, she didn’t need to, but it was a great help for him who doesn’t know it.

In the afternoon the cultural events began with a group of dancers from the state, they danced three songs, a calypso, a waltz and a merengue from the Caracas of yesteryear. It was a very nice show, it was seen that all the children dedicate a lot of time to this activity, because they were very synchronized.

To culminate, a teacher and his students went on stage and while he narrated stories from different authors in a cheerful way, the girls were dressed in pajamas and animated the narration by making gestures and movements related to the sequence and involving the audience.

I really like this kind of events where national culture is highlighted and reading is encouraged. In today’s society, so far away from books, we need children to feel comfortable and happy to hold a book in their hands or to let their imagination fly by creating a text from their imagination. We urgently need to recover the habit of reading and this kind of acts contribute to achieve it 👏🏼👏🏼.