World Book Day 2023

As a teacher, you know the importance of reading and the power that books can have in shaping the lives of your students. World Book Day is a perfect opportunity for you to celebrate the joy of reading and encourage your students to explore the wonderful world of books.

The World Book Trust has a range of free resources to support the day (and reading in general) click on the following links for a full list of free resources for Nursery, Primary, Secondary and home use. Whether children are celebrating at home or at school. Reading and sharing stories is the perfect activity for everyone to enjoy.

World Book day also has The Author & Illustrator Academy, the Academy beams authors & illustrators right into classrooms so children can meet the creative minds behind their favourite books. Beam your favourite World Book Day 2023 £1 book authors and illustrators direct into your classroom . Why not get your creative juices flowing using words and illustration with Joanna Nadin and Rikin Parekh, or merge words and pictures with Nadia Shireen. Let Michael Morpurgo help you find the seed of your story, or invent a fantasy business idea with Rashmi Sirdeshpande. Each inspirational ‘lesson’ is a complete package with downloadable activities, creative challenges, resources and extracts to go with each video. They are available all year round so you can screen them in class at any time that suits you.

For more in-depth author interviews and lesson planning and activities, ReadingZone Live 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. 

                                               

The latest redevelopment of the fantastic Bett Award-winning ReadingZone Live resource not only hosts interviews with over 50 authors but for some of the featured authors, there are now extracts from their books with a range of comprehension questions, self-marking quizzes and tasks to complete and includes additional activities that complement author interviews from ReadingZone Live. These activities and interviews aim to inspire young people to explore new authors and genres and to develop their own creative writing. Contextualised cross-curricular opportunities have also been developed to cover elements of, not only English but also the Science, History, Geography, Art, Music, DT and Computing Curriculum for Primary Schools.

Don't forget to join the ReadingZone Bookclub programme of free virtual author events each term. The book club is aimed at classrooms and libraries that are keen to develop a love of reading with Events for ages 5-11 years. These events are open to schools and classrooms and are free to join! Meeting an author can have a real impact on children's Reading for Pleasure - and taking part in a virtual book club event is a great way to end the week!

The ReadingZone Bookclub is aimed at classrooms and libraries that are keen to develop a love of reading and the events are aimed at students aged five to 12 years.  These events are open to schools and classrooms and are free to join.  Meeting an author can have a real impact on children's Reading for Pleasure - and taking part in a virtual book club event is a great way to end the week!  To sign up for any of these free events, and for more details, email info@readingzone.com

ReadingZone Bookclub Virtual Author Events 2023:

Celebrate World Book Day with Andy Jones
Friday 3rd March, 2pm - 2.45pm For Yr3 - Yr 6 (ages 8-11)
Andy Jones will introduce his hilarious new book, Bob vs the Selfie Zombies (Bonnier Books), in a fun, interactive event that focuses on reading for enjoyment as part of our World Book Day celebrations.

Learn about the Weather with Caryl Hart
Friday 10th March, 2pm - 2.45pm For Reception & Year 1 (ages 4-6)
Caryl Hart will introduce children to her bestselling series, Meet the Weather, Meet the Oceans, and Meet the Planets (Bloomsbury Children's Books), introducing children to concepts and facts about weather and other KS1 topics, and exploring non-fiction texts.

World War II mystery with Rhian Tracey
Friday 24th March, 2pm - 2.45pm For Yr5 & Yr6 (ages 9-11)
Author Rhian Tracey introduces I, Spy (Piccadilly Press), her adventurous and thrilling new book set in Bletchley Park at the start of World War II, based on true events and inspired by her great-aunt Audrey, who was a codebreaker!

ReadingZone is also challenging those aged four to 18 years to make a picture book for the ReadingZone Picture Book Competition 2023, in partnership with World Book Day. The competition is open to individual children, libraries and schools in the UK and internationally.  Prizes include £200 of books for each winner's school or library, plus a free online author event for the overall winner. The competition is open to schools, libraries and homes until midnight on Friday 21st April 2023 and is a great book-based activity for World Book Day. Author and illustrator Elys Dolan (How to Make a Picture Book, Mr Bunny's Chocolate Factor etc) will select the winning picture book entries across three categories: Young Creators,  Primary,  and Secondary.

Busy Things have a wide range of resources to support World Book Day. BusyPaint and BusyPublisher have 100’s 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 digital templates perfect for World Book Day, such as getting your students to write about their favourite story or book or why not create a story summary, book review or book cover.

Busy Things have also developed a comprehensive series of ReadingZone Live-related interactive resources that link in with the teaching material developed by LGfL and the LEO Academy Trust. there is a cornucopia of new materials already available including fun digital activities based on books from authors Cressida Cowell, Oliver Jeffers, Mini Grey, Michael Morpurgo (an author of one of the £1 books available this year) and many more. Visit English > Reading: comprehension in your chosen setup and explore all the
The Busy Things team have curated some of these resources into lesson plans which you can find in the Lesson Library, The Lesson library can be found on the Welcome screen and also within the Teacher hub of your Class setup. Each lesson helps children read, discuss and demonstrate their comprehension of your chosen book extract. The library includes extracts from nineteen well-known books suitable for ages 5 to 11. Each lesson includes 3 or 4 activities to test understanding of the text.

You could use the j2e tool suite to complete one of the following activities: 

Use j2vote to have a virtual vote on World Book Day itself as to who is your student’s favourite author or illustrator is in your class or school how about finding what World Book Day £1 book is the most popular here is a simple jit5 Pictogram I made for the event.

Why not ask your students to write a biography of their favourite author using j2e5 or get them to make an interactive author timeline, here is Roald Dahl's interactive timeline I have made via creating a presentation in j2e5 and using hyperlinks to link the pages.

I have created a range of templates you can use for World Book Day using the jit5 digital tools designed to support EYFS and KS1 learners, including a book review template, a design your own book cover template, a simple story summary template and a character profile template that all can be used within jit5.

The j2e tool Suite includes a World Book day tab (look for this to be updated soon) that has templates that can be used on World book day this tab will go live on the 1st of 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.  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 that 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 are some great titles available to support pupils from Key Stage 2 to A-Level with fantastic fiction titles including ‘Face’ by Benjamin Zephaniah and ‘The Story of Tracy Beaker” by Jacqueline Wilson. All of these titles can be played to a group of students straight from a PC or laptop or pupils can listen individually through headphones.  To find out more about the benefits of audiobooks for your students, click here.

If you have access to an iPad or a MacBook why not try my World Book Day Keynote challenge using Live Video, With the new live video feature you can now add a live video feed from your iPads/Mac’s internal camera to a slide within Keynote. You can also use an iPad, iPhone or another external camera as a live video source. During a presentation, the live video plays only when the slide it’s on appears.

I have added some of my favourite book characters and added questions with images and added live video boxes to make the characters come to life. (to record the content I have used screen record with the microphone option on) To add live video just Click the live video icon within the add/plus symbol on the slides to select it. To modify the live camera settings just click the Format button, click the Live Video tab, then do any of the following: Zoom the camera in or out: Drag the Scale slider right to zoom in and left to zoom out or change the shape of a live video: Click the menu next to Mask, then select the size and shape you want.

You can use my template here, or create your own using my idea, I would love to see how you use the live camera option.

Dominic Traynor an Education Evangelist for Adobe has a project perfect for World Book Day which can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange here.

Dominic Traynor tells us “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.”

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, discovering, experiencing, exploring and imagining.
Another live event to join is the World Book Day Story Makers Show 2022 from Puffin Schools. The 30-minute show will premiere on Thursday 3 March at 10:30 am and will then be available to view on-demand. It will be streamed via YouTube Premiere. Register to save the date, and get the latest news on the line-up and free resources.

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, donating a book, building a book scene in a box and much, much more here.

In the last months, my household has every Saturday been obsessed with finding out "Who's that behind the mask?" by watching The Masked Singer every Saturday evening (FYI I guessed all of the final 2 contestants this year)  to add a touch of magic and mystery to World Book Day why not organise a ‘Masked Reader” event, getting your school staff to record themselves reading while being in disguise! You could do this by filming yourself reading physically wearing a mask or you could do it digitally with a filter, there is a range of filters out there, For example, on supported Apple models, you can use the built-in Memoji FaceTime app, you can become your favourite Memoji or Memoji character (on an iPhone with Face ID).  you can use a built-in filter to change your appearance and add stickers, labels, and shapes. You can take screenshots/screen recordings in FaceTime that includes the special camera effects you add.

Another way to create a masked reader is to use the filters in Snap Camera. Bring the magic of Lenses to your live streams and video chats on PC & Mac via this free desktop application that brings the fun of Lenses to your computer! You can choose from thousands of Lenses, a few of my favourites are Snowman, Robot and The Green. Once you select your lenses this can be used as a virtual camera* that you can select within your chosen video hosting tool, just remember once you have filmed your video to turn your filter off before you make any important video calls! 

Click here for a doc that shares a few of my favourite free digital filters. and do feel free to use this logo I have made to support the event.

*A virtual webcam is a software application that allows users to use their computers' resources during a video call instead of using a live webcam. In other words, users can place images, videos, and other sources as their primary output during a video call.

The National Literacy Trust has a range of resources to support World Book Day, with free online author events for ages 5 through to 14, and new, free resources to help bring the excitement of World Book Day and the pleasure of reading to your classroom,
The National Literacy Trust has a range of World Book Day free online events for schools and settings:

The Great World Book Day Draw-Along with Dave Pigeon (ages 5 to 8)
Date: Monday 27 February Time: 9.30am
World Book Day and the National Literacy Trust present the brilliant author/illustrator duo Swapna Haddow and Sheena Dempsey for this 30-minute jam-packed event as they jump into the world of Dave Pigeon: Bookshop Mayhem.
Hear all about where they get their ideas, their top tips for creating your own stories, and get the chance to give it a go yourself in class with a live draw-along.

Footy & Booky Quiz (ages 8 to 12)
Date: Thursday 2 March Time: 9.30am
We're excited to invite you to our third annual World Book Day Premier League Takeover Footy & Booky quiz!
Kick off the fun with our 30-minute online quiz featuring two rounds of questions (one football-themed, one reading-themed), pitched by your footballing heroes and our writer pals.
Hosted by a top sports presenter, YOUR school has the chance to participate live, win prizes and generally have a ball.

World Book Day – Being an Ally: Real Talk About Showing Up, Screwing Up, and Trying Again (ages 11 to 14)
Date: Monday 27 February Time: 11.00am
World Book Day and the National Literacy Trust present Natalie and Naomi Evans, contributors to Being an Ally: Real Talk About Showing Up, Screwing Up, and Trying Again and founders of the platform Everyday Racism. During this 45-minute session we’ll explore their part in Being an Ally, from the process of becoming a contributor to their own reflections on their writing.

To sign up to these events and for more details go here and for teaching resources and activity ideas for World Book Day 2023

In conclusion, World Book Day is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the joy of reading and to encourage your students to explore the world of books. By incorporating these ideas into your classroom, you can help your students develop a love of reading that will stay with them for a lifetime, Whatever you have planned for World Book Day 2023 please do remember to share your student's work via our Twitter or Facebook pages and use the event’s hashtag #WorldBookDay2023 and we will help share your student’s work with a greater audience.