World Book Day 2015

Today (Thursday 5^th March) is World Book Day and every school in the country should be celebrating the joy of books and reading for pleasure. I can’t think of a more wonderful occasion on the calendar! Over the years it has become a key feature of the event that pupils come to school dressed as characters from their favourite stories. At the secondary school where I work, we have turned things around this year and it is the teachers themselves who have been asked to attend as the heroes, heroines and villains of their most well-loved tales. I have decided to put all my normal lessons on hold and instead we are going to be spending the entire day having fun exploring the world of fiction. I’m going to be asking my classes why they think we need books in our lives and what the world would be like without them. We’re going to be using drama and role play to bring our favourite stories to life and act out scenes where the characters we love are faced with their biggest challenges and moments of conflict. I will also of course be using this opportunity to share the experience of writing my own series of books, and at the start of each lesson, I’ll be reading an extract from ‘The Faery Tale of Rosie Quartz’ to my pupils. I cannot think of anything more important in schools than encouraging our children to read and instilling within them a lifelong passion for books. Authors have the powerful ability to teach us so many things – the most poignant being how to dream and use your imagination and that once you have mastered that, then anything is possible. I wouldn’t be who I am today if it wasn’t for my two amazing grandmothers introducing me to books at such a young age, and I certainly wouldn’t have become a writer. I hope all my readers are going to be doing something wonderful to celebrate World Book Day today and that it cements further your passion for reading. If you get dressed up, please send me photos! I’ll be posting mine later 🙂