World Book Day!

World Book Day is on the 6^th March. However, for reasons unknown, the school I work at
celebrated on the Friday 7^th. But what did we do? Did the day go well? And most importantly, is it still cool to dress up in high school?

Yes. It’s always cool to dress up. Always.

I love dressing up, and seeing as you don’t really get asked to do it much beyond Uni years, I fully embraced the opportunity. I’ve never really heard of any high schools making their students dress up for World Book Day. In my experience it was limited to pre and primary school. And, because I’m blonde, and was an even blonder child, Alice in Wonderland was the inevitable choice for much of the time. But no, here at the boarding school I work at right now, World Book Day is thoroughly celebrated every year, and students and staff really get into the dressing up. I guess it’s just nice to not have to be in their school uniform for the day. My costume this year was the Owl, from ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ (I was carrying around a toy cat – I did not manage to make a pea green boat). Some of the costumes were stunning. There were photo opportunities during the day, and lots of people turned up to be snapped (lots more than last year apparently) and there will be a prizes given out at the end of the term, for groups and individuals. Us librarian staff get to choose a winner, and there's an open vote held on the intranet so the pupils can choose too. Some of the great costumes that stick in my memory was a 'Very Hungry Caterpillar' constructed from a sleeping bag, a pack of Dalmatians, a Coroline (including buttons!) and the cast from the Three musketeers. There were also some odd ones, Teletubbies and Mario/Luigi included, who I'm pretty sure don't have a single book to their name. But it's the taking part that counts :)

The English and RS departments also banded together to organise a debate about evil portrayed in fiction. That happened in the evening and seeing as I couldn't attend, hopefully I can get the low down on how it all went from the staff who arranged it and perhaps do a post. Maybe they'll even be a guest post!

We also held a Book Amnesty:  As we’re a boarding school, and as such, seeing as the students live on site, we can’t really install any security in the library (imagine if an alarm went off at midnight when we weren’t there?), a LOT of books don’t get signed out properly and so go ‘walkies’. We really pushed everyone to keep a look out for library books and return any they may have that haven’t been signed out properly, with the promise of no wrath from us library staff. (Not that there’s normally wrath. We’re usually just glad to see the book back).  This was fairly successful, especially in Junior Library, where several missing books appeared in the returns box, placed sneakily in when we weren't there!

I think the success of the day was, in part, due to the hype we tried to create. Obviously this being my first and only year here, I don't have previous years to compare to - but I really feel we pushed advertising it well in advance so people could prepare an outfit. I made sure to ask pupils and staff about it often, to keep it on everyone's minds and I think people probably wanted to shoot me by the time the day finally arrived, but it all paid off and costumes were worn all throughout the day.

In the run up to WBD, I had another idea for a display in Junior Library. I designed a poster, asking them to imagine what the world would be like if Harry Potter, Katniss, Matilda etc had never existed. I then put a tub full of cards and pens to the side of the notice board and invited them to write down their favourite book characters. I wasn’t sure whether I’d get a response but I actually had the opposite problem - we almost didn't have enough notice board! Characters ranged from Winnie-the-pooh, to God (!?). It was also a really great way of seeing which books they’re reading so we can buy them for the library if we don't already have them. To follow on from this, as Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit was a fairly popular character choice, I've done a new display asking 'If they could spend a day with one character from LOTR, who would it be and why?' with some pictures of characters and reasons they might want to hang out with them. For example: Gollum - You could go for Sushi (we hear he likes raw fish) and play a good old fashioned game of riddles. Some response so far, but it's only been there a day, so we'll give it time before I comment further.

Basically a fun day overall. Here’s the social media side of things for World Book Day:

Website: http://www.worldbookday.com/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/worldbookdayuk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WorldBookDayUK/

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/WorldBookDay2012?feature=guide

and that's me done for now. Time to go to work (I think I'm one of few people who can honestly say they look forward to going to work!)
Over and out.