In school today, we celebrated World Book Day. The aim of the day is to celebrate the joy and value of books and the art of reading.

Children, and many staff members, attended school dressed as book characters and it was very interesting to see the different costumes. Thank you, parents, for your efforts in getting costumes prepared/made. The money that pupils donated for the privilege of dressing up today will be used to purchase new books for our school library.

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Some pupils chose to enter a competition which required them to produce a painting of a character or scene from a book of their choice. A great deal of time, thought and effort had gone into these and everyone at school thoroughly enjoyed looking at them. This year, each class, chose a winner and a runner-up from another year group and I know that the children did not find deciding on winners an easy task. All competition winners will have the opportunity to show their paintings to the rest of the school during tomorrow’s Superstar’s Assembly. All paintings have been kept and will be displayed around school.

As this year’s theme was ‘Share a Story’ the pupils in older year groups visited the children in lower year groups in order to share a story with a child from a different class. The younger children were very excited to be listening to another child read a story to them and it gave the older children the opportunity to show off their reading abilities. It was rewarding to see the children communicating and getting to know each other a little better. After both staff and pupils talked about the experience and certainly felt that this was something that they would like to do more often.

During English lessons Key Stage One and Key Stage Two children were asked to write a story independently which included the character that they had chosen to dress up as. Staff are looking forward to reading these stories and some will be displayed, in school, over the coming weeks.

Some interesting and appealing book token have been designed by the children and will be entered into the National World Book Day competition. One winner and one runner-up will be selected from three age categories. Winners (school or child) have the opportunity to win book tokens. Let’s hope that some of our children’s entered are successful!

Children also designed their own book covers and had quizzes in their classes.

This year, as with previous years, World Book Day at All Souls was a great success and I would like to thank all those involved – pupils, parents and staff. The joys and benefits of reading are enormous and we, at All Souls, hope to continue to encourage and enthuse all of our children with above of reading that will last well beyond World Book Day.

Please remember that World Book Day is on Thursday, 1st March, 2018 and that the children can come to school dressed as a book character of their choice. For this privilege, children are asked to donate one pound. All of the money raised will be used towards helping to purchase new books for our school library. Also, the children can enter an in-house competition to paint a picture of a character or a scene from a book. These paintings can be brought into school from today.

Children in Years 3, 4, 5 and 6 need to ensure that they have chosen a short, suitable, age-appropriate book to read to a child in another year group. This book can be brought in from home or borrowed from the school library or a classroom library. Children in Year 5 will read to children in Nursery and children in Year 6 will read to children in Reception. Year 4 children will read to Year 1 children and Year 3 children will read to Year 2.

We are looking forward to seeing the children in their different costumes on Thursday.

Thank you for your continued support.