World Book Day is a registered charity on a mission to give every child and young person a book of their own. It’s also a celebration of authors, illustrators, books and (most importantly) it’s a celebration of reading. In fact, it’s the biggest celebration of its kind, designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and marked in over 100 countries all over the world.
This is the 23rd year there’s been a World Book Day, and on 5th March 2020, children of all ages will come together to appreciate reading. Very loudly and very happily. The main aim of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.
This World Book Day the goal is to ‘share a million stories’ across the UK on Thursday 5 March. So sign up and record every time you share a story to be in with a chance of winning £1,000 worth of books every week throughout March.
The World Book Day website is packed with resources for Nursery, Primary and Secondary schools with lesson plans, activity sheets, assembly plans, discussion guides and much more for you to use on the day.
Their is also a second series of creative, inspiring and interactive films for you to screen in class at ANY TIME that suits you. These 12 new films have been created to inspire all students aged 5-12, whether they’re reluctant readers or aspiring authors and illustrators! Featuring a sensational line-up of authors and illustrators including Waterstones Children’s Laureate Cressida Cowell, Eoin Colfer, Matthew Syed, Francesca Simon, Matt Haig, Muhammad Khan and Katherine Rundell. Every film comes with FREE classroom resources too!
Introduced this year is the World Book Day Social is a fun and informed online festival for young people taking place on Wednesday 4th and Thursday 5th March. Over two days and evenings, we’ll be sharing fun and inspiring content and chat with bestselling authors and illustrators, all based around our theme of READING IS POWER.
Schools can access the online festival during the day on our website and social media feeds with extra content for young people at our WORLD BOOK DAY AFTER DARK after-party from 7-9pm each night.
Featuring:
- Exclusive Reading is Power podcasts
- Power book reading recommendations
- Power playlists for reading and working to, as recommended by your favourite authors and illustrators
- Instagram real-time readalongs
Reading Zone Live from LGfL is the perfect resource to use within your class on World Book Day, the site is packed with interviews with authors including Michael Morpurgo, Oliver Jeffers, Jacqueline Wilson and Cressida Cowell to name a few. Alongside interviews with the authors explaining their inspiration and writing resources, there is also a range of resources for teachers to use in class.
Busy Things have a wide range of resources to support reading and writing across the primary range. BusyPaint and publish has 100’s of templates to choose from with easy to use features that children can use to create their own stories. They have also handpicked a series of resources for World book day, as you can see below.
Or why not use the j2etool suite to complete one of the following activities: You could have a vote on World Book Day as to who the favourite author is in your class or school, ask the children to write a book review or a biography of their favourite author using j2e and finally they could use the tools in JIT to create an alternative book cover or design their own character. The tool suite includes templates that can be used on World book day and this will be live from 1st March.
The whole story resource from LGfL aims to explore how storytelling can maximise creativity within learning activities for children. By capturing the expert advice of a professional storyteller and arranging this advice into a simple interface, it is hoped that teachers of all age groups can get inspiration on how to incorporate storytelling across the curriculum.
Another fantastic resource to use on World Book Day is Listening books, these popular audiobooks for KS2-KS5 pupils are fantastic for supporting SEND pupils and feature both fiction and non-fiction titles.
Or use Talking Stories 1, Talking Stories 2, Talking stories 3 from 2Simple, on World Book Day, featuring stories that include: Orpheus and Eurydice, The Wishing Tree, Sherlock Holmes, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Great Fire of London, these resources include teacher notes and lesson plans.
Don't forget you can also listen to a range of books with Listening Books If you are not aware of Listening Books, it is a charity providing a service for people with print impairments. Reading is essential for any child’s success. All too often, the barriers faced by children with difficulty reading outweigh their desire to read and, without proper guidance, they never may never overcome them. Listening Books offers audiobooks which can be used with children and young people who struggle to read books in the usual way due to an illness, disability, learning or mental health difficulty.
There is a great range of fiction and non-fiction available to support pupils from Key Stage 2 up to A-Level, including:
- British History Makers: King Henry VIII by Leon Ashworth
- GCSE English: Of Mice and Men: The Text Guide by Coordination Group Publications
- Secrets of the Rainforest: Predators and Prey by Michael Chinery
- Matilda by Roald Dahl
- An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming (Young Adult Version) by Al Gore
- Dates with History: 6th August 1945 The Bombing of Hiroshima by John Malam
- My Friend Walter by Michael Morpurgo
- The Elements in Poetry: Poems about Fire edited by Andrew Fusek Peters
- The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
- Face by Benjamin Zephaniah
Dominic Traynor our Education Evangelist for Adobe has a project perfect for World Book Day which can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange here.
"This sequence of 5 lessons can be taught at any time of year once a group of students have finished studying a book in class. Alternatively, it can be taught in the lead up to World Book Day so that they have a video book review to share with the rest of the school.
It can also be condensed into a full day project for World Book Day itself. I would recommend completing the writing in the morning and then allowing students to film and edit in the afternoon.
Here is a great example of good book reviews in a primary/elementary school setting. For an idea of how to share their work in a special, whole school community celebration, watch this video of how a school near Manchester in the UK celebrated their work."
Why not also use Adobe spark to design your own book cover and or retell or create alternative endings for well-known stories in Adobe Spark Video?
The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) has a wide range of free resources for World Book day, for tips on running a successful day, developing a Reading for Pleasure school all year round and engaging parents with books and literacy. The resources for schools contain easy and fun activities based on key themes of creating, discover, experience, explore and imagine.
BBC Teach has put together a great collection of resources for Primary and Secondary pupils, perfect for inspiring your class. Featuring awesome authors, authors live and a selection of well-known stories retold and brought to life in short animated films there is something for everyone.
With many people, noting that World Book Day had become just a chance for children to dress up the fantastic author Jo Cotterill has come up with a fantastic range of World Book Day Alternative ideas, these include Potato and Egg characters, donate a book and build a book scene in a box you can see these ideas and more here
Apple Books has a wide range of Digital children's books to download and read in primary and secondary classrooms usually you may not know that there are plenty of free books available too. To find books, try opening the Top Charts section where you will see the most popular paid-for and free books and don't forget that when using iPad there is a range of accessibility features within Apple Books, including the ability to change the font size, background colour and have words read aloud when selected.
What do you have planned for World Book Day we would love to see your pictures and work please share via our twitter or Facebook pages #WorldBookDay2020
Original Post written by Dawn Hallybone edited for 2020 by Bradley Dardis