Celebrating the Joys of Reading: Reflections on School Book Week

We got back to organising a Book Day last year, after many years. At that time, I was advised to build up to the day. With many activities planned around books and reading over a month, we approached ‘Book Day’, which was filled with author sessions, with much excitement and anticipation. 

This year, we knew we needed to spread it across a week, due to various logistical considerations. Last year's success with the ‘build-up’ around books and reading led us to realise that this was something we wanted to share with the entire school community…not just the children, but teachers, parents, and support staff.  

As we conducted the different events, there were suggestions to hold them for more age groups and adults alike. 

While our selection of authors was thought through for each age group, and the interactions nurtured much reading and writing joy, and although an important part of our #bookweek, we found that since as a school we invite authors and resource people often to interact with our children, through the year, it was the concentrated effort around books, reading, poetry and creating, that together with the author sessions worked towards bringing about that bookish buzz.

As part of the library committee that plans the week and works towards making it a reality, we considered our purpose of holding a Book Week. We knew for sure that this was not something that we wanted to use as a way to promote/advertise ourselves as a school, but rather to consider what the children would gain from it, and take forward as they interact with books, growing as readers and writers. We are not looking for stories as entertainment, but true engagement with a theme, genre, or way to express themselves.

So we planned activities for some of our youngest children, in a way that they could engage and relate, we had Parent-Child reading sessions in the library to underline the importance of reading to your child, helping parents experience the joy, sessions for older children to express themselves…poetry, creative writing and comic making; a Book-Swap to help children learn to exchange books with each other and experience the joy of finding a ‘new’ book; Inter-house events got the children bookishly earning points for their house…from creating reels to promote reading, to pitching a book to a ‘movie producer’, complete with a business plan, designing bookmarks around a theme, Scavenger hunting for books around the library and more. In our bid to encourage reading all across school, DEAR time had everyone with their heads down into the pages of a book and we have planned a story time for our support staff, to help them enjoy the magic of a good story. 

It’s been quite an effort and journey for us as we think about what a Book Week should be/mean…and we know for all we want to underline through this, a week is not enough. Onwards towards planning a month of books, reading and stories!