I spent just fifteen minutes with my author hat on in school this week, but I spent many, many hours engaging with children and teachers and books. The reason: the Wallace Hall Primary Book Festival.
For the past couple of years I’ve been working a couple of days a week as a learning assistant. Schools are very good at making use of the talents and enthusiasms of their staff, so it didn’t take WHP long to realise that I am the woman to talk to about children’s books. Last year, I was away the week of World Book Day, when the school runs a literacy week (but I was on a writing retreat). This year, one of the teachers and I planned a week-long school Book Festival based around the Questioneers picture book series by Andrea Beaty illustrated by David Roberts.
Each class took one of the books, which feature a scientist, an illustrator, an illustrator, an engineer, a teacher and an activist, and their class teacher based class activities around that book. P7 were off on their residential trip for half the week so they missed this part.
Each day of the week we held book-related activities:
On Monday, we had shared reading, with children from higher up the school going into lower classes to read with children.
On Tuesday, we had Speed Book Sharing, where the class sat in two lines facing each other and each child had 30 seconds to share a book they loved with their partner before moving on to the next person. We also ran a sponsored read on this day with children collecting money for time spent reading, proceeds to go to new books for the library.
On Wednesday, we had a Dress a Potato as a book character competition. Children were wildly enthusiastic about this and we had some amazingly creative entries. In the afternoon there was a parent open day, so parents came in to share classroom activities with children and view the competition entries.
Thursday – actually World Book Day – I wasn’t at school (and I needed the day off after all the running around!). Classes visited the local library for storytime.
On Friday we had an all-school IDL activity inspired by Andrea Beaty’s characters Rosie Revere, Engineer, and Iggy Peck, Architect. Small groups of mixed-age children were given missions to design and build for different fictional characters, such as a hot air balloon to carry Goldilocks out of the forest, a waterproof boat to carry the Gingerbread Man across the river and a wolf-proof house for the Three Little Pigs.
Running alongside all this, in the corridor there was competition in the corridor to match teachers to their favourite children’s books. Tricky, but lots of fun!
And my 15 author minutes? I spoke to one of the classes about how to plan a story. Always a good one.
So now we have to plan next year’s Book Festival. I don’t know how we’re going to live up to this one!
