This week we celebrated World Book Day at Sharples, but for the first time ever this was all done virtually! Every subject and teacher was involved in designing interactive, engaging and brilliant lessons based on a particular fictional book. In English, students participated in a Harry Potter virtual escape room, in Maths students worked on code breaking (try your luck with the above image) and puzzles, based on the book ‘The Book of Blood and Shadow’. In Art, students looked at designing bookmarks based on particular illustrator styles, whilst in IT students enjoyed designing a robot, based on the book ‘Eager’. History students read an extract from Oliver Twist before writing about crime in the Victorian Era and students in RE read an extract from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe before relating this to religious motifs. Overall it was a brilliant day with lots of engagement and lots of reading. Students and staff thoroughly enjoyed the day and with lots of brilliant feedback!
On Wednesday, as World Book Day celebrations began, Mrs Smith and Miss Ayub hosted Peter Boon, a young adult fictional book writer. He ran a great session with our G2G pupils, students listened to Peter describe his inspirations for the writing, how his writing has developed and also the successes and challenges of being an author. Students then listened to a fantastic reading of ‘Who Killed Mrs Finch?’ and then had an opportunity to ask any questions. The students were absolutely brilliant, they engaged well and appreciated Peter’s knowledge and advice for our budding authors.
Here is some feedback from the students:
‘The author was very talented and spoke clearly about his book. He encouraged others to read it and also read the book amazingly. Definitely a session I enjoyed.’ – Faheemah Patel 7H.
‘It was really interesting when he was reading the book and I really enjoyed finding out about him whilst people were asking questions. Overall I think it was really good and I would buy one of his books one day.’ – Noah Lythgoe 7H
‘I really enjoyed the G2G session with Peter Boon. His books sound very good and mysterious. Learning about how he became an author and how he wrote books inspired me to write. I think that I will definitely enjoy reading some of his books and maybe one day become like him!’ – Farah Dakri 7P
‘I enjoyed Mr Boon’s talk very much. I’ve always wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know about all the work that goes into it. It seems like hard work but Mr Boon showed us how fun it could be to experiment with your imagination.’ – Fatimah Matadar 8L
‘I really enjoyed listening to Peter Boon read out two chapters of his book. I have never really thought about purchasing a muder mystery book, but now I am going to buy one of his books. I have always wondered if it’s easy to publish and write a book and he said the hardest bit was getting people to buy it, which was quite interesting. Overall, I really liked the talk.’ Evie Almond-Smith 7A
‘I found Peter Boons talk yesterday about his experience of writing novels very informative. His explanation of how he became a successful writer was extremely interesting and he gave lots of enthusiastic responses to our questions.’ – Jayden Cross 9L
‘I thought that this event was an amazing way to understand what an author feels like and what paths he has to cross to make these astounding books.I had a wonderful time and as an individual i felt like i learned something and saw things from an author’s point of view which was very interesting’. – Munisha Talisheth 7E
