Posted on: March 6th 2020
Despite the grey skies above, Norfolk House was once again a riot of colour and fun on World Book Day.
Thankfully, the rain stayed away long enough for Senior Prep to parade their fabulous costumes in the playground and the Senior Prep Book Club and our Form 6 heads of library helped to judge the winners.
Congratulations to Lexi and Max in Form 4 who came as Claude the dog and Bertie from ‘The Butterfly Lion,’ Toby and Ted from Form 5 who came as ‘The Bubble Boy’ and Roald Dahl’s George (complete with his marvellous medicine) and Aran and Sasha in Form 6 who came as the three little pigs and an entire dictionary!
Congratulations also go to Kaira and Scarlett in Nursery, Byron and Tobias in Reception, Charlie and Zari in Form 1, Shiv and Lydia in Form 2 and Matilda C and Una in Form 3 for an amazing range of costumes including a troll, a giant peach, Clarice Bean and even the author, Liz Pichon!
We had a bumper buddy swap over again this year with Form 6 visiting Form 2, Form 5 heading over to see Form 1 and Form 4 visiting Reception. The sessions with the younger children are always a highlight of our World Book Day celebrations and this year the children read together, scribed stories and the Form 2s helped to act out some short helicopter stories that had been specially written by Form 6 for the occasion. It was wonderful to see how willing the children were to collaborate with each other across year groups, read aloud to an audience and even get up and perform and we definitely have some talented actors in the making.
The fun has been ongoing all week too as Nursery, Reception and Form 1 were treated to some engaging drama workshops on Tuesday morning and by all reports, the children had a huge amount of fun with Tom. He played games and got everyone up and moving in the classrooms whilst learning more about texts by Eric Carle and Julia Donaldson. Another huge thank you to the FoNH for financing the workshops and we can’t wait to see what West End in Schools have in store for Forms 2 and 3 in their drama workshops on Monday 9th March.
Form 5 were also lucky enough to have an author come in to see them on Wednesday this week too and Mary Rosambeau really enjoyed her return visit. She was thrilled with the engagement of the children and the wonderful questions they asked and as a bonus, we sold all of the copies of ‘Secrets and Spies’ that we had in stock. It is always a real privilege to hear an author talk about their own work and read the words they have so carefully crafted and Mary really inspired all of us in the session.
So to summarise, we have had an amazing book filled week across both sites and all of the children should be heading home with a new book to read from our Bumper Book Swap and a real desire to get reading and writing. The children and staff in Forms 3-6 are incredibly excited about the ‘Kid Normal’ event that at the time of writing this, has not yet occurred but look out for some of the children’s reviews of Greg James and Chris Smith’s author session in the next newsletter.
Finally, I just wanted to say that the teachers and the children really appreciate the support you’ve given over the past few weeks in order to foster a love of reading for all and you can now put away the sewing machine, glue gun and paints for a little while and settle down with a good book or two.
See some photos of our World Book Day celebrations in the photo gallery.
Happy reading everyone and well done once again,
Mrs Osborne
