June 21, 2023
Written by Sharan Kaur, Librarian at Cardinal Wiseman Catholic School
Our day for celebrating books, authors, writing and reading was once again a roaring success. A huge thank goes to our World Book Day team of volunteers for helping to prep and run the various stations.
In place of a dress up day, we celebrated World Book Day through a variety of challenges, we had our very own Miss Trunchbull, our very own Ollivander and a clue hunt; just to name a few. Students also got to exchange their book token for a free world book day book in our very own little book shop.
The Masked Reader
Students had to guess which teacher they thought was behind the book
Author Quest
Students had to search around the school for hidden pictures of Authors and then research a title of their work.
Hogwarts Mail
Students who read and quizzed with a good accuracy and also reached a benchmark of 20 mins on Accelerated Reader between October and February received their Hogwarts Mail congratulating them on their success and to also invite them to choose their reward from our very own Ollivander…the wand chooses the wizard.
Photo Booth
No dress up doesn’t mean that we didn’t have any fun. This year our photo booth theme was the ‘Chokey’ from Matilda. Our very own Miss Trunchbull was there to put our students in the chokey, perhaps for not enjoying their reading enough haha.
Microfiction competition
Students were tasked with writing and submitting a short story of a theme of their choosing but with a word limit of under 1000 words. This was open to all but primarily aimed at our KS4 students. We had some great submissions, with the most popular theme being thriller. Mrs Stoker the Assistant Head and English Teacher was our VIP judge, the standard of work was quite high and 4 stories were selected as the top entries. We purposely left the closing date towards the end of term so we could include the winner as a part of our end of term reading celebrations.
Little book shop token exchange
We had arranged with our book supplier to have the world book day books in advance so we could set up a little shop in the Library where students could exchange their token directly with us as a surefire way of ensuring each student got their book as a gift and memento of the day.
Read the most on myOn: In collaboration with the Unicef Award
We are a Unicef rights protecting school, so the Student Unicef team reached out and asked if there was any way in which we could collaborate on WBD. As it happens, Article 17 states that all should have the right to access information. We subscribe to myON news and so the challenge was set across all year groups to see who can read the most non fiction or news articles on myON by the end of term.
Celebrating the winners
As term draws to an end and we reach the Easter holidays we used the time during our reading slot to celebrate the reading successes this term through virtual assembly as well as to reveal the winners and answers to the World Book Day challenges.
Correct entries from the ‘Masked Reader’ and the ‘Author Quest’ were put into an online spinner wheel and the winners were picked live via the videocall . Their prizes were very kindly donated by a local supermarket as part of their community outreach programme.
The winner for most myON read was one of our EAL students in year 11 and the creative writing winners were awarded a gift voucher!
To hear all about how Sharan maintains her school library and keeps secondary students motivated to read checkout her blog series, The Librarian Files.
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