It has been a BIG week for celebrating our love of reading here at Lindisfarne Primary School with last week’s celebrations for Book Week. This year we had numerous ways of sharing and celebrating our love of books and all members of our community were able to participate. We started off the week with all students from Kinder right through to our Grade 5/6s using a single egg carton cup to design a character or book cover. With this activity, students had to think about possible characters and books that they were familiar with that they could use to design their artwork. This involved lots of brainstorming in classrooms, sharing of ideas and planning. It is amazing walking around the school and seeing these artworks displayed in classrooms and having children from other classes look at these and be inspired by what their peers have created.

Our staff never shy away from participation and for Book Week this year, it was no different! For some weeks leading up to Book Week, our staff cleverly choose out some of their favourite books to be placed on to the front cover. Some staff choose their current class novel or author focus for their class and some choose to be placed onto their very favourite childhood classics. These are currently on display in our Library Hub, our students have enjoyed looking at these during library and finding all of our staff members featured in them.

Of course, everyone’s favourite part of Book Week is the parade and this year we had a slight twist on previously held parades. Due to the postponement of Book Week from August, we were able to organise and host a parade outdoors on Loatta oval. We experienced fantastic weather for the parade and it was brilliant to be able to see our school community come together to celebrate a wonderful occasion. Our students and staff were excited to share their own costumes as well as view what others had come dressed up as and we had a huge turnout of parents and families who sat and watched the parade from the comfort of their picnic rugs and chairs. We also had the Mercury come along to photograph the parade and these images were shared in their online gallery and some even featured in the following day’s newspaper! Our SRC executives, Will, Ireland, Isobel and Jack did a wonderful job hosting the parade and coordinating the accompanying music and we thank all of the families who helped with costumes and came along for our parade, it really was a special day to be involved with.

These are not the only learning experiences that took part over the week, as we had many classes participate in creating book reviews, writing narratives, speak and listen in class discussions about favourite books and complete art activities. Many classes have used Seesaw to communicate with families about the fantastic learning taking place, all with a focus on our school priority of reading. Here are a few snapshots of the learning that has been happening in classes:

While Book Week is over for another year, the Children’s Book Council of Australia has announced details for next year’s event. The theme is ‘Old Worlds, New Worlds, Other Worlds’ and the dates for the celebration are August 21^st-27^th. We are already looking forward to next year’s celebration!

Sophie Sheehan

Literacy Coach