One of our favourite weeks of the year takes place after half-term with BOOK WEEK (Monday 28th February – Friday 4th March) in celebration of World Book Day on Thursday 3rd March.  Of course, every day here at Southill is a book day, it’s super special though when the whole world joins in too.  Yippee!!

As you’d expect we have LOTS to look forward to during this special week, we are guaranteed to have fun with this year’s theme You Are a Reader which describes us all very well.  Here’s what we have planned including activities to celebrate at home and an exciting competition too:

📚 Virtual interactive workshops with children’s authors:

As part of the Chesil Education Partnership, we will take part in several online workshops with authors such as Eileen Browne, Emma Carroll and Dan Freedman.  These authors have written many of our favourite stories such as Handa’s Surprise, Letters from the Lighthouse and the Jamie Johnson football series – our children are very familiar with them. Workshops like these provide excellent experiences to learn first-hand from the writers themselves and so we are really looking forward to being involved.

📚 Lunchtime ‘Surprise Story’ sessions

All children are invited to our new Library to listen to a story read each day by a different member of staff, they’ll need to come along to find out who the mystery reader is for that day!  Staff have hand-picked some of their favourite stories to create a super exciting reading session not to be missed …

📚 BOOKFLIX Trolley On-The-Move!

LOOK OUT for Mrs Wood and Mabel driving our beloved BOOKFLIX trolley, making their way to each class with a selection of exciting new ‘trending’ reads.  We are thrilled to bring BOOKFLIX back to it’s new home in our new Library, remember to keep an eye on our interactive display in the hall for all our latest recommended reads.

📚 Fitness Thursday – Character Circuits

Our popular fitness sessions take on a booky twist – come and enjoy some fitness fun on Thursday 3rd March with some of our favourite characters!

📚 The Southill Primary Book Character Competition

Our much-anticipated annual competition takes the form of a lolly stick coming home with children this week.  Decorate your stick as your favourite character from a book, be as colourful and creative as you like! Please return them to school by World Book Day (Thursday 3rd March) where they will be on display and judged by our brand new Reading Champions.  You could win a book token!

📚 World Book Day: visit from Simon Philip, children’s author 

We all know Simon here at Southill, you may remember our Cracking Good Reads video recommending his book ‘I Really Want the Cake’ recorded back in 2019.  Simon really enjoyed this video, so much so that he kindly recorded two Cracking Good Reads of his own especially for us which we shared during our first lockdown in 2020.  You’ll find all these videos below, along with some of his most popular titles currently within our school Library.  We are really pleased to welcome Simon to Southill, he’ll be spending the whole day with us and each class will have the opportunity to meet him throughout the day.  Very exciting!

📚 World Book Day: Bedtime Story read by Mrs Wood

At 6.30pm we’ll be streaming a special bedtime story read by Mrs Wood, we’ll also be sending a chocolate chip cookie or alternative home this day (kindly donated by Belle’s Bakers) for children to enjoy whilst listening to the story.  For those unable to tune in at the same time, we’ll leave the video up on our media channels to watch back when convenient.  Don’t miss it!

We’d love to show a BOOKFLIX TV video collage featuring our ‘current reads’ to be shown during Book Week.  Please take a book selfie (a photo of yourself with one of your favourite reads) and send to our usual media address media@southill.dorset.sch.ukAll children featured will receive a special BOOKFLIX certificate!

Finally, below is a list of suggested activities that you can enjoy at home to celebrate our brilliant Book Week, we’d LOVE to see what you’ve been up to.  Anything you send us will be featured within our social media stories – please use the usual media address above.

Phew, what a lot we have to look forward to!