A reading school

World Book Day 2023 – a summary of an amazing day of reading, sharing and talking about books!

Children at St Katherine’s enjoyed a wonderful range of activities during World Book Week this year. Every class enjoyed circle time, sharing lots of book talk, and talking about the character they are dressed as and the book and prop they bought in.

Reception children made mini books and bookmarks and built an amazing giant’s castle from their class book – Jack and the Beanstalk! EYFS also explored ‘Where the Wild Things Go’ and produced some beautiful stories.

Year 1 loved telling their very own Little Red Riding Hood (aka Miss Lawson) all about their books – a favourite was Sam who loved sharing his book ‘Prince of Pants’ – he was covered in pants, even wearing a pair on his head! There were princesses, footballers and superheroes in Year 1 all enthusiastically listening and joining in a fabulous question and answer session on all their book choices.

In Year 2 we had Paddington Bear, Matilda, Princess Smartypants, a chef representing an amazing range of cookbooks and a footballer with a book all about his hero Marcus Rashford. Year 2 also listened intently to ‘Odd Dog Out’ read by a virtual author.

Years 3 and 4 discussed their characters and their qualities, creating a character profile and writing key actions, feelings, ideas, thoughts and key places their character might go!

Year 5 had a number of ‘Wednesday Addams’ from the popular TV series, The Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, We also had Harley Quinn, a zombie, Mary Poppins, Harry Potters and Hermione, Bix from Hocus Pocus, Arrietty from the Borrowers, Enola Holmes and plenty of footballers sharing stories about their sporting heroes.

At 11.00 KS2 tuned in to the BBC’s live lesson led by Michael Rosen where we learned all about different genres of books, ingredients for those genres and then the children were invited by Michael Rosen to write a familiar story with a twist at the end. Year 6 loved this and turned a number of traditional tales on their head with the three little pigs attacking the big bad wolf, Little Red Riding Hood (or Colossal Blue Killing Skirt) eating the wolf and dying of chronic indigestion, Baby Bear not just eating the porridge but Goldilocks too, the Three Little Pigs provoking the well-behaved wolf when he is making some DIY adjustments in his home and Big Little Blood Hood invading Pepper Pig Land! We also had an evil Gingerbread Man, a benevolent version of Malevolent and a wicked Stitch! Year 6 also discussed their character and book and then wrote a book review of their chosen book and designed a book mark.

In our ‘Bringing books to Life Workshops’, KS2 retold the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ through dance and KS1 did the same with ‘The Enormous Crocodile’ – we had some amazing cheeky monkeys, many hungry crocodiles, elephantine elephants and yawning hippopotamuses! KS2 children presented freeze frames of different parts of the book and created a very impressive dance routine which included the Caucus race, the White Rabbit’s frantic adventures and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

KS1 were lucky enough to have the extremely popular Magic Molly back. She presented her fabulous workshop and she came back after school to sell copies of her book which the children loved!