What a wonderful week of book celebrations for St John’s C of E Primary School! Instead of celebrating on just World Book Day, the whole school celebrated their love of books throughout the week. Reading is such an integral part of all children’s learning, and we felt it was really important to embrace this year’s World Book Day theme, ‘Read your way’ with a whole host of activities across the week to inspire our children.

The children in every class learnt the story, ‘The Jungle Book’. This activity involved: reading the story, recreating characters and making props, practising speaking performances before each class retold a section each of the story. This was then filmed and put together with each classes’ version to recreate the traditional, well-loved story. We look forward to sharing our collaborative school version with the children ahead of a professional theatrical performance of ‘The Jungle Book’!

This year, our whole school genre focussed on Aesop’s Fables. Each class studied a different fable and learned of their distinctive style and features, with each fable having hidden meanings and morals which helped the children’s learning and understanding. It was pleasing to see such an array of work produced across the classes from the chosen fables. The children enjoyed: recreating the story, producing artwork, building DT projects based on their fable, drawing comic book strips or retelling the fable in their own style.

And the fun and learning didn’t stop here! We welcomed the children (and adults) into school dressed as a vast array of book characters. The children shared joy in their chosen costumes and enjoyed talking about their choice of character. During the day, the children also completed character trails around the school grounds whereby they had to locate and correctly name the characters found. Additionally, live lessons took place and artistic talents were put to the test with the children designing their own WBD token to enter the national competition.

To finish the day, the whole school took part in a book quiz. This involved the children joining their respective House Captains and they were tasked with answering questions based on books the children have shared and been reading within their classes. The quiz was a real success with the children answering with great enthusiasm and passion whilst demonstrating fantastic knowledge of the texts that they have been exposed to in their classes. This led to very close scores…3 Houses had the same score and the other house only 1 point behind! Quizzing then commenced the following day with UKS2 to find the ultimate winner for this year. The winning House was then celebrated in the Praising Assembly on Friday and earned themselves extra play the following week.

Class teacher said “A real highlight of the quiz was seeing the children answering the questions with such passion, about the books they had shared within their class. It really showed how engaged the children are when listening to their class books, and how important sharing stories is at school as well as at home”.

St John’s most certainly enjoyed a busy, fun-filled literature week with many memorable moments shared.