World Book Day at Normanhurst was an amazing event with our pupils attending school in themed hats! This year the school theme was “Mad Hatter’s Hat Party”. Children were asked to design a hat based on a book, author or character. There were so many creative and colourful ideas!
Throughout the day there were various activities in classrooms to celebrate the day.
Early Years:
The children had great fun on World Book Day. They had been very creative at home, making some wonderful hats from their favourite stories. They each got to have a go on the sharing chair to tell their friends all about their hat.
“There is a glass eye, Mrs Twit had a glass eye that was always looking the other way.”- Eve
“I used some tissue paper for the hair and red strips for the fire.”- Leo
“Daddy helped me to get the wood down from the real tree, it’s a stick man”.- Lenna-Mae
“A big black bird put Superworm in his mouth. All his friends saved him.”- Olive
They also had a different ‘Helicopter Story’ session and based it on World Book Day characters. The children enjoyed dressing up as different characters and creating stories to act out.
Year 1:
Year 1 loved looking at the different hats made for World Book Day. Children wore their hats proudly around the school and throughout the day! William’s hat, inspired by his favourite book ‘The Snail and the Whale’ was voted as the class winner. There were various activities throughout the day and they are already looking forward to next year’s celebrations!
Year 2:
Year 2 celebrated World Book Day by wearing special hats that they made and decorated. They also listened to stories, coloured their own bookmarks and played a game of guess the character! The game brought a lot of laughter to the room and children thoroughly enjoyed trying to guess the characters from their favourite stories!
Year 3:
The children took turns to show off their hats and describe or act their book challenging the other pupils to guess the book! The children then wrote their guesses on a white boards to share with the class, with the winners receiving house points.
The children also designed and made their special World Book Day bookmarks.
Year 3 absolutely loved making their hats at home for the World Book Day and sharing it with everyone in their classroom!
Year 4:
Pupils created some wonderful World Book Day hats, ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s safe to say Year 4 are big Harry Potter fans, with 4 hats themed around the famous wizard.
The children voted for their winner in a secret ballot; the competition was fierce! Well done to everyone who took part and presented their hat to the class!
Year 5
On World Book Day, the students in Year Five enjoyed sharing their amazingly creative hats and head pieces which were inspired by some of their favourite books.
In the morning, the students enjoyed listening to the final few chapters of their favourite class book, Cosmic by Frank Cottrell-Boyce.
In the afternoon, Year Five walked down to visit some of the residents at the Spinney Care Home. During their visit, the children shared their World Book Day hats with the residents – everybody was very impressed with the children’s innovativeness and creativity. The children also read aloud to the residents; they were great entertainers, reading their stories or poems with fantastic expression and intonation.
Overall, Year Five had a fantastic World Book Day and can’t wait to celebrate again next year!
Year 6:
Year 6 started the day by presenting their hats to the class. There were many interesting designs ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Jack and the Beanstalk. The design by Daisy was voted as the best hat design and won the ‘Best Hat’ title for Year 6.
They also played ‘Who Am I?’. A chosen pupil came forward and a book character’s name was stuck on their hat. By asking Yes/No questions to their class mates, they tried to find out the character they were given! There were a lot of books that were visited: class books that were read in Year 5 and 6 as well as childhood classics! There was a lot of laughter and very careful thinking and eliminating through questioning!
The following day, Year 6 visited some of the residents at the Spinney Care Home. Year 6 pupils read poems and short stories to the residents and talked about their inspirations for their hat designs. It was an amazing afternoon and we are looking forward to visiting Spinney again.
Throughout the Juniors, there were also some competitions running. First competition that ran during the World Book Day week was ‘Design a Potato’ challenge, in which children were asked to design a potato in the style of the favourite book character.
The second competition was our ‘Make a Book Trailer’ challenge, which challenged pupils’ digital skills. It ran for two weeks and the winners received a lot of house points and prizes!
The third competition was the Short Story competition, in which the pupils were asked to write a short story with less than 50 or 100 words. This also ran for two weeks and the winners received a lot of house points and prizes!
Our last competition was to ‘Design a National Book Token’, which was ran by the World Book Day organisation. We have sent in many amazing designs and looking forward to the results being announced!
Junior pupils also took part in the ‘Read for Good’ charity event. They challenged themselves to raise money for charity by completing a READathon in March. They asked their friends and family to sponsor them. Read for Good charity provides brand new books and exciting story times to children who are in hospitals around the UK. Normanhurst pupils were proud to be a part of this and support a great cause.
A big THANK YOU to Normanhurst Juniors for taking part in so many competitions and designing amazing hats! We are already planning our next World Book Day celebration!
