Book days and book weeks

If you want to excite your pupils interest in reading, try holding a book day in your school or, if you're more ambitions, a book week. To help you plan it, here are some ideas for events and activities you might like to include:

1. Have an author visit to bring reading alive and show children how books are made. You'll find more information on author visits on our school visits page and you can use our search facility to find authors willing to visit your school.
   
2. Have an illustrator visit. Children are fascinated by seeing drawing in action. It can stimulate their own interest in art as well as their reading. (Many picture book authors are also illustrators. To find them, pick the author/illustrator category in our search facility.)
   
3. Have storytelling sessions, reading whole stories for younger children and tempting first chapters or extracts to older ones. They are more interesting if the readers are people the children don't usually see - local librarians are often happy to help with this.
4. Design covers for real or imaginary books..
5. Create individual fiction or non-fiction books. Why not let the children choose which they do? Boys, in particular, often enjoy writing about facts instead of making up stories.
6. Dress up as characters from books. Try to give the parents plenty of notice so they've got time to organise this. It's more fun if the teachers do it too.
7. Run a book quiz. This can be done individually or in teams.
8. Act scenes from books or a whole picture book story.
9. Create huge pictures in groups, showing a scene from a book or a scene with lots of well-known characters.
10. Make a wire and paper sculpture of a favourite character.
11. Play hunt the character. It's like hunt the thimble, but you hide a toy based on a book character. A sheep is a good choice - there are plenty of sheep in stories and all toy sheep look the same.
12. Take the children on a trip to the library.
13. Organise a trip to a bookshop to spend World Book Day tokens or ask a bookseller to come to you.
14. Create a class book - non-fiction can work better for this than a single story and involve other areas of the curriculum.