Reflecting on Book Week 2022

Book Week 2022 was a bookish blast! Our Book Week this year fortuitously coincided with SLANZA's first ever Aotearoa NZ School Library Week. This is a week that celebrates school libraries around the motu. 

Our Book Week kicked off with the Scholastic Book fair, which was well supported. Thank you to WPS parents and whanau for supporting the fair. We have raised almost $2000 in books for the school library. It is great to be able to stock the shelves with new, exciting books for the children.

We celebrated books by inviting community guest readers to read to children including parents and whanau. Past principal, Liz Manley visited and read to children. Debra from the Titirangi Community Library read The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors to a class, followed by a Rock Paper Scissors challenge. We all celebrated together with a morning tea.

On Thursday of Book Week, Weng Wai Chan, visited our school. The visit was organised through Read NZ Te Pou Muramura who run an excellent Writer's in Schools programme. Weng Wai won the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction at the NZ Children's and Young Adult Book Awards in 2020, and received a Storylines Notable Book Award in the same year.

Weng Wai Chan was warm, friendly, engaging and sincere. She shared some of her early life in Singapore bringing in humour and educational information. She shared a picture book she had written in younger days, making the process of writing and illustrating tangible for the students. A bit of Zumba got the children to have a stretch and a wiggle before they settled in for some more interesting learning.

After presenting in age appropriate ways to the three whanau groups, Weng Wai ran a writing workshop to a group of around 20 children. I was impressed with our tamariki who answered questions and engaged with the author, showing how much their teachers have taught them about writing narratives. They went away buzzing.

 

Weng Wai gifted us a signed copy of Lizard's Tale.
Her books can be bought at Unity Books
and other bookshops and are available widely online.

We also ran a Bookmark Design competition - and winners were drawn. Children could choose prizes from the Book Fair. I'll post some of the gorgeous bookmark entries soon. The winners' bookmarks will be printed out and made available to children in the library. It was a "pawsome" effort!

Teachers also made use of some of the excellent resources in the SLANZA Aotearoa NZ School Library Week booklet, including search and find pics, word searches, crosswords and more. I believe there was a literary quiz too (I missed it as I was packing up the fair). 

The sun came out for our annual Book Character Parade, which was a real blessing. It was wonderful to see parents back at school - all of us enjoying a special event together. The pics and videos are on the Woodlands Park School Facebook page. Here's our principal, Nardz Stephenson dressed up as Violet Beauregarde turned into a Blueberry, and "I am Jellyfish", plus Thelma the Unicorn (who walked into a netball pole)! The costume winners excitedly collected their prizes from the Book Fair after the parade.

 

At the end of the parade, I was presented with a kowhai tree, which I will plant in the corner of our garden to attract Tui birds. It was a special moment for me!

Now I have the job of cataloguing and covering the new books. Thank you everyone. There is a blog post on 19 August thanking you all in more detail.

Ngā mihi

Kate