World Book Day Fever

World Book Day gripped the nation on Thursday 3 March. Pupils and staff from schools across the world donned costumes of fictional characters to celebrate authors, illustrators, books and reading. Shiplake College was no exception: staff picked out their best fancy dress outfits to celebrate the day, which marked the 19th year that World Book Day has been recognised. Amongst the Shiplake cohort, there was a Mildred Hubble (The Worst Witch), a Dorian Gray and a Gruffalo.

The staff thoroughly enjoyed donning the costumes and creating excitement about reading. Reading for pleasure, as well as for academia, is a strong focus of the Shiplake College community, and World Book Day provides the ideal platform to remind pupils of this. Miss Claire Knight, Shiplake’s Digital Librarian, had a cunning plan to make the day more engaging for the pupils. A competition was held, to see who could match teachers to their chosen characters. The premise was simple; whoever matched the most amount of teachers to their characters, and in the fastest time, won. The race was on: pupils all over the school were exploring the site, trying to find Miss Marple, Where’s Wally?, Hermione Granger and Mad Hatter, amongst many other fictional characters who had stepped off the pages and wandered the College grounds!

Lower School were the runaway winners, and the team of Henry Poustie, Jamie Seddon and Tom Sharpe claiming victory, having found all of the teachers dressed up. The team won a collection of brand new books for Lower School, for the pupils to read and borrow. Miss Knight said of the competition: ‘I was really pleased with how many people got involved- both pupils and staff. We had a fantastic afternoon in the Thinking Space as well, making bookmarks and partaking in a myriad of reading-based activities, including word games and drawing. It is a fun and interactive way of getting the pupils interested in reading, which is fantastic.’