This year World Book Day was a fabulous celebration of both staff and student reading with many events taking place across the school throughout the week.

Firstly, we had the House Door competition. This involved each form group creating their own portal to a book of their choice on their form classroom door. We had everything from Coraline to 1984 to The Hungry Caterpillar to The Lorax. After a very difficult adjudication, the winners were announced as 9K for KS3 with their tribute to Alice in Wonderland and 10W with their terrifying ‘Chokey’ from Matilda.

Throughout the week leading up to World Book Day, students had an assembly entitled ‘The Masked Reader’. The aim of this assembly was to remind students of how important reading aloud is, whether it is in small groups, in the classroom or in the form of public speaking. It is important that we all read aloud to gain confidence, improve our communication skills, and embrace opportunities both personally and professionally. In order to show this to our students, we challenged members of staff to read aloud. They were all dressed in inflatable suits on the stage and students had to guess who was reading and what text they were reading from.

As students walked into school on World Book Day, they had a bit of a shock as they were greeted by staff dressed as different book characters. We had Mrs Kelly as the Cat in the Hat, Ms Milburn as Professor McGonagall, Miss Cooper as Maleficent, Mr Jenkins as the Very Hungry Crocodile and many more. All day there was an air of excitement around the school as students wondered which ‘book character’ would be teaching them next.

Finally, all Year 7 students had the opportunity to meet the writer Muriel Driver, author of the ‘Zondor the Magnificent’ series. She spoke to the student about becoming a writer, read to them an extract from her novel and then ran a writing workshop on how they might add to her story.

Now we are all thinking about how we can beat the celebrations next year!