CBCA Book Week 2025: Taking Our School On An Adventure!

The end of Term 3 is always a hectic time, with assessments, exams, reports, year 12 graduation, and other end of term extra-curricular happenings, so it’s no surprise that my post for our 2025 Book Week celebrations has been sitting in my drafts for over a month!

This year was only my second year running Book Week activities and, similar to last year, I ran a couple of competitions aiming to boost the visibility of reading for fun alongside some activities in my Wide Reading Program. The 2025 theme was Book an Adventure, which provided a lot of fodder for creativity amongst my students and colleagues!

Wide Reading Program

Last year I did a word cloud activity, but this year I planned ahead and bought a couple of book packs for the CBCA’s shortlisted titles in the Picture Books and Older Readers categories. Using these books, I was able to send my students on a Blind Date with a Book.

This activity was supported by the PowerPoint above along with the worksheet below to help students organise their thoughts about each book. Students rotated through a few books in the course of the lesson and at the end we discussed what they thought about each text and which were their favourites. Our Book Week was held a week after the official event, so the winners for each category had already been announced. I therefore asked each class which book they thought was the winner in each category; interestingly, while a few successfully identified The Truck Cat as the winner for the Picture Book category, no class picked the winner from the Older Readers books!

Overall, I feel like this was a fairly successful activity, though it did require a few tweaks to work for different classes. A number of the Older Readers books ended up being borrowed and having a few reservations placed for them, indicating that there was a bit of interest in these titles from our students.

Door Decorating Competition

Our most visible Book Week activity is our Door Decorating Competition. Last year our Office Staff had a controversial win, and this year the competition was intense between a number of different faculties who were intent on taking on the top honours.

Our Office Staff this year did a fully interactive, multi-day spectacular where they dressed as flight attendants and made in-flight announcements at the start of each period. The English staff were inspired by The Wizard of Oz and decorated every door in their block to take students on an adventure through the story. However, the HSIE faculty were the winners at the end of the day with their immersive Jurassic Park experience, complete with printed book chapters, dino-paws, music and lollies for our student judges. They even let the dinosaurs loose on the playground! Such chaos!

Cosplay Competition

Without a doubt, the highlight of our Book Week celebrations for the students is our Cosplay Competition. I was once again able to organise it as a mufti day, with all funds raised going towards the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. This year our winning cosplayers were a group of mischief-making Gryffindors whose magical performance involved a floating feather and wowed the crowd.

It was wonderful throughout the week to see such enthusiastic discussion around books and reading. Our various activities also give me an opportunity to showcase the library’s value to our school community. Book Week tends to be viewed as a more primary activity, but I highly recommend High School TLs give it a go too! There’s so much potential value that it can add to our work and gives our students and colleagues a chance to celebrate the wonder of picking up a book.

CBCA Book Week 2024: A Success!

A few weeks ago I held a belated Book Week in my high school. It was my first time running a week-long celebration of reading and I’m pleased to report that it was a huge success!

I had a variety of activities planned throughout the week, but the two big highlights were the Door Decorating Competition and the Staff vs Students Cosplay Competition. Our faculties went all out to decorate their doors with their favourite books and it was a great way to spark conversations with our students about reading. I took a team of student volunteers with me to judge the winners based on three criteria: 1) creativity; 2) adherence to the theme ‘Reading is Magic’; and 3) overall visual impact. The level of detail on some of these doors was astounding!

However, my student judges ultimately decided that the winners were our lovely office staff, who may have got the win by bribing them with fairy bread to match their ‘Fairy Magic’ display. They also wrote a fantastic poem to go along with it, and their display was a delightfuly prominent representation of our school’s positive reading culture for all students and caregivers to see. Sadly, my photography skills don’t do it justice!

I was a bit nervous running the Staff vs Students Cosplay Competition and didn’t really know what to expect. I started a conversation on one of our professional networks to see if anyone had done something similar and got some excellent advice from my colleagues, especially around the logistics of timing, prizes, and associated paperwork. The Head Teacher of the PDHPE faculty, who normally runs a mufti fundraiser for our local AECG, allowed me to piggyback off her event so that all students could dress up in either regular mufti or as a character from their favourite book. This worked brilliantly, as it allowed kids not interested in participating in the competition to still dress up while giving some of our more shy students a chance to dress up without standing out too much. It also removed the logistical difficulty of getting students to change into their costumes at the start of lunch.

I definitely underestimated how keen our school community was to dress up. I was expecting only a few students and staff to participate in the competition, but boy was I wrong! I initially printed only 15 permission notes thinking I’d have plenty of spares but quickly had to print more. In the we had 34 competitors with plenty more dressed up just for fun. I gave staff and students an opportunity to have a photo taken in the library during our first break and had a line up almost the entire length of the library! I was surprised that some of our more disruptive, reticent readers got in on the fun, which goes to show that we never can judge a book by its cover. Even our school executive got in on the fun! At lunch we held the actual competition and we only just made it through everyone in the half-hour break.

Overall I feel like this was such a wonderful experience for our school community. It took a lot of planning and paperwork on my end but it was so much fun and definitely worth the effort. I’ve learned some important lessons and will make some adjustments next year to hopefully help things run more smoothly. The feedback from both staff and students was overwhelmingly positive, and having the visuals through the costumes and door decorations was a fantastic way to promote reading for pleasure. It allowed me to showcase the library as a crucial part of the school community, promote its resources, and to advocate for my work and its continuing importance in a fun way. Most importantly, it was a great opportunity for students to connect with each other in a way that they might not otherwise been able, and it gave some of our shy students a chance to develop a bit more confidence in a safe way. For anyone trying to build a whole-school culture of reading in their own community, I’d highly recommend running similar events!

CBCA Book Week 2024

Our Book Week was delayed this year due to my extended absences and a prior calendar booking for NAIDOC Week activities in Week 5. But the time has finally come for me to run my first ever Book Week, and I’ve put together a variety of different activities to build a culture of reading and encourage my students to engage with the library and literature within our walls.

In addition to the activities open to students, I’m running a Faculty Door Decorating Competition to help increase the visibility of our reading habits across the school and hopefully spark some positive conversations with our students about their own reading identities. A number of staff members have shown interest in this as well as the Cosplay competition, with one colleague commenting that “it’s not often us high school teachers get to have fun with Book Week!” It just goes to show that despite the chaos and lack of time facing teachers, sometimes they’ll jump at the chance to do something fun which builds community spirit – we just have to give them a chance, build positive relationships with our colleagues, and not be scared to put ourselves out there. I can’t wait to see what they produce and am so incredibly grateful for their support!