The Children’s Book Council of Australia promotes Children’s Book Week each year as an Awards Program for Australian authors and illustrators as well as a fantastic opportunity for schools like ours to celebrate books and the characters that bring stories to life.
This year’s theme is ‘Read Grow Inspire’. It challenges us to reflect on what we read, grow from the ideas found in books and inspire others to improve and challenge themselves.
At St Greg’s our Book Week celebrations don’t just last for the week but start when the shortlisted books are announced for the Awards in Term 2. Each class investigates these texts and reviews those in categories such as Picture Book of the Year, New Illustrators Award, and so on.
However, our formal Book Week celebrations started this year on Thursday, 17th August with a fabulous visit from author, illustrator, script writer and television producer, Mick Elliott.
Mick Elliott Author/Illustrator Visit
Amongst many other feathers in his cap, Mick Elliott is a well-regarded Australian author and illustrator. His first series, ‘The Turners’ is a middle grade novel meshing humans with animals in hilarious fictional and fantasy events.
Mick’s younger readers series, “Squidge Dibley” is targeted at Years 1-6 students and all of these classes have enjoyed reading the very unique Squidge Dibley’s adventures as he destroys the school, history and the galaxy, all from his Year 6 classroom.
Mick also released his first picture book in July this year with more to come.
Our students and teachers all thoroughly enjoyed Mick’s sessions where he discussed the power of story and encouraged students to see the daily question of “How was school?” as an invitation to tell their parents the story of their day.
Our K-2 student’s sessions focused on illustration techniques and using less strokes to create characters. Some of our teachers and students were immortalised by Mick as human giraffes (Mrs McKay) and the world’s strongest boy (Arlo, Kindergarten). These sessions were filled with laughter and fun.
Our 3-6 student’s sessions were more about the power of story, generating ideas, drawing from personal experiences to create or re-create humour and craft, revise and keep working on their stories.
“Mick was so inspiring! I’ve started writing and illustrating my own “Mums and Monkeys” book where the monkeys do naughty things like kids do! Mick also loved my Monkey portrait of him” Adriana, Year 2.
The feedback from teachers and students was wonderful and we thank Mick for his inspiration.
Spanish Stories to celebrate Spanish Day
On Friday, 18th August, to coincide with Spanish Day, both Senora Grados and Mrs Khan recorded two of the CBCA Shortlisted books in Spanish. Many students came into the Library that morning to enjoy the Spanish recordings of ‘Jigsaw’ by Bob Graham (translated by Senora Grados) and ‘Snap!’ by Anna Walker (translated by Mrs Khan).
To continue the theme, Mrs Khan also gave her time generously at Break 1 to translate my English into Spanish, reading ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle, together.
We are very fortunate to have so many passionate educators willing to share their knowledge and experience with our students.
Community Library Collection Launch
On Monday, 21st August we held a Breakfast for Parents and Carers to launch our new Community Library Collection and Before School opening hours.
As of Monday, 28th August our Library will be open to parents and their own children only from 8am-8:20am, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. During this time parents may choose books from the Community Collection (donated adult fiction and non-fiction books) to take home to read then return later, browse books with their own children to reserve or borrow, and/or sit and read together.
We are hoping that this initiative will be well-attended during the trial period so that we can make it a regular feature of our Library program.
Book Character Parade
Of course our BIG Book Week event is the annual Book Character Parade. This was held on Tuesday 22nd August with a fabulous turn out of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, plus more, to see the amazing costumes that our students were inspired to wear to celebrate the theme, ‘Read Grow Inspire’.
Our Junior School Teachers chose the ‘nature’ theme for their group effort and it was wonderful to see everyone looking incredible as bees, the seasons, butterflies and much more. They looked amazing!
But… nothing could compare to the efforts of our students (and of course, their parents, grandparents and other friends and family). The theme definitely lent itself to a wide range of real life people from autobiographies and biographies as well as junior fiction novels. There were many James Tedescos, lots of Sam Kerrs and Tim Cahills, and even an Ash Barty. Traditional and newer characters were also well-represented with lots of hungry caterpillars, superheroes, gaming legends, Mary Poppins, Juliet the Vet and even Barbie made an appearance!
Lots of fun was had by all and one random student from each class won a prize for participation. We also announced each of the Book Week Competition winners:
- Lolly Bouquet Guessing Competition: Winner - Madden in 1B with the correct answer of 23
- Nature Art Competition: Kindergarten: Isaac in KB won with his ‘Very Cranky bear”; Year One: In Year One, Rosie created a very fancy ‘Celeste the Flamingo’; Year Two: Giovanni’s Pig the Grub used a great variety of natural resources to create a very grubby character; Year Three: Ella’s beautiful rainbow piece, inspired by ‘Colours of the Rainbow’ used a variety of petals and flower buds to create a beautiful rainbow piece; Year Four: Rafaela’s incredible ballroom dress that would be perfect in Cinderella was constructed with leaves from her passionfruit vine and petals from what looks like a rose bush; Year Five: Congratulations to Eli who created a spectacular ‘Brave little owl” out of vibrant green leaves; Year Six: Nuala whose interpretation of Tangled or Rapunzel used a variety of natural elements to create an incredible collage.
- The Tail Tale writing competition: Winner - Disas in Year 6; Runner Up - Thomas in Year 5.
- Book Review Competition: Willow (Year 2) for her review of ‘Bedtime is Boring’ by David Campbell; Harrison S (Year 3) for his review of Tiny Timmy: The Big Break by Tim Cahiill; and Zachary L (Year 4) for his review of Weirdo 8 by Anh Do.
Well done to all of these, as well as all of our other entrants. Every year it becomes more and more difficult to select from an incredible range of talented entries in these competitions,
The Great St Greg’s Spelling Bee
Directly following our Book Character Parade was the finals of “The Great St Greg’s Spelling Bee”.
Since the beginning of Term 3, Mrs Limbrey and Mrs McKay have been holding heats in K-2 and 3-6 respectively for any students wishing to enter the Spelling Bee. It is important to note that every spelling bee is a game - you may be lucky enough to have an easier word selected whilst the person following may have a much more difficult one - that’s all part of the game.
After four weeks of heats, our finalists were revealed:
- Kindergarten: Aidan, Ariana M, Wynter, Cody, Hormis
- Year 1: Xavier P, Judy, Teresa, Lucia, Emerson
- Year 2: Ellie, Hugo, Nicholas, Harrison R, Olivia G
- Year 3: Alexa (3M); Lachlan (3M)
- Year 4: Jessica (4M); Arabella (4M)
- Year 5: Marley (5B); Addison (5B)
- Year 6: Merin (6M); Nuala (6B)
The day before however, Mikayla and Jarryd who had originally tied behind Nuala replaced her due to a planned absence. This meant that they only had the night before to practice so their efforts were extremely admirable. Addison was also unable to attend on the day.
Each of the students had a word blindly chosen from a basket to repeat, spell, then repeat again. It was a very tense 30 minutes of competition and it felt like the whole school was holding their breath but eventually we narrowed it down to a Winner and Runner Up in each category.
- Congratulations to Lucia in Year 1 for winning the K-2 Spelling Bee, and Hugo in Year 2, Runner Up.
- Congratulations also to Arabella in Year 4 for Winning the 3-6 Spelling Bee, and Jarryd in Year 6, Runner Up.
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And that’s a wrap on Book Week 2023. We held many bookish activities during Break times as well and had an enormous amount of fun dressing up and sharing adventures throughout the week.
Special mention must go to Ms Dodson, our Library Assistant whose generous spirit, laughter and passion for books and our Library Program events is greatly appreciated.
Mrs Cosentino
Teacher Librarian/Literacy Specialist