World Book Day is an annual celebration of books, reading and the power of words. Around the world schools, libraries and other organisations plan and take part in a variety of ‘booky’ activities and this year Northgate had its biggest celebration yet with a week of activities and competitions.
In the lead up to World Book Day Miss Ling held special assemblies with pupils across the whole school discussing ‘readaxation’- the act of reading to relax – and talking to pupils about how they can ‘read to succeed.’ Miss Ling also shared a few book recommendations based on recently released titles …
Year 7 and 8 recommendations:
 
Year 9 and 10 recommendations:
 
*All of these titles are available in the Learning Hub.
The ‘beast from the east’ slightly delayed our big World Book Day events, but we wouldn’t let the snow get in our way and on Thursday 8th March we held our World Book Day fundraiser, raising money for Book Aid International (a charity that provides books and supports libraries in developing countries).Â
Pupils were invited to donate £1 to dress up as their favourite fictional character with a wide array of characters and books represented. Costumes included Harry Potter, Paper Towns’ Quentin, Sherlock Holmes, Gangsta Granny, Timmy (from the Famous Five series), Katniss Everdeen, Thing 1, Yuki (from the novel Wolf Children) and Twilight’s Alice Cullen. However, the winning costume went to Freya in Year 7 for her fantastic Esio Trot outfit.
Staff also got involved with the P.E. department dressing up as Where’s Wally and our cover team collaborating on Harry Potter costumes that featured Dolores Umbridge, Narcissa Malfoy and Ron Weasley. Other staff costumes included Edgar Allen Poe (complete with raven), Cruella de Ville and James Bond.
At lunch time students were also invited to take part in our ‘Bake Expectations’ competition and bake sale. Students were asked to bake something with a bookish theme and some of the stand out bakes included Fantastic Mr Fox inspired cupcakes and a Homer Simpson shaped cake. However our two winners were Caitlin’s Willy Wonka cake and Ben’s rainbow World Book Day cake that had a variety of book spines around its edge. The winning pupils received a book and trophy as prizes.
We raised a total of £365.57 for Book Aid International- enough to send 182 books to libraries in developing countries!
As well as the events on World Book Day itself, there were also a number of activities students could take part in across the week including two live Q&A’s with authors Mitch Johnson and Jess Butterworth, hosted by our school reading group, the Page Turners. Students used the library twitter account (@ngatelhub) to send their questions and waited in anticipation as the authors responded to them. You can find an archive of both discussions below.
[embeddoc url=”https://www.northgate.norfolk.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/World-Book-Day-Twitter-Conversation.pdf” width=”80%” height=”1000px” download=”all” viewer=”google”]
Finally, we held an inter-form competition in the form of a book quiz; students were quizzed about a variety of children’s books and the winners in each year were:
7DNi, 8KT, 9AB and 10HN
A particular well done to 8KT who were the overall school winners with an impressive score of 30/32!
We would like to say thank you and well done to all pupils and staff for their fantastic World Book Day efforts… we’re looking forward to next year’s book week already!
