This year, World Book Day at St Helen’s was a huge celebration of everything we love about books and reading.
On Thursday 2 March, students and staff were invited to come to school dressed as one of their favourite book characters and it was a delight to see what creativity was unleashed. The characters teaching lessons during the day included Macbeth, Anne of Green Gables, the White Rabbit and numerous Wallys who kept getting lost around the PE Department. The Library was supervised by Little My, Mr Toad (still disguised as a washerwoman), Elizabeth Bennet and Little Red Riding Hood.
Many students from Hogwarts appeared to be on an exchange visit with St Helen’s and classrooms were inundated with many Mr Men and Little Miss characters. Little pigs spent the day evading several big bad wolves and a house with chicken legs stalked the corridors and gracefully manoeuvred through doorways at lesson change time.
During break and lunchtime there was some serious storyland business to attend to. Julia Donaldson’s beloved character Stickman had been found snapped in two and the race was on to identify the location of the incident, the weapon and the guilty party. In a school-wide live game of Cluedo, students had to identify staff who could give them a clue in return for a correctly answered book-related question or riddle. The first students who solved all the clues and pieced together the details of the crime correctly, won a book from the Library prize table.
Edie (Year 5) said: “I really enjoyed the Cluedo game because we got to explore the School and it was fun doing it dressed up”.
Lucy (Sixth Form) added: “World Book Day was so much fun this year. The murder mystery was funny, exciting and got us running all over the School. I loved the clues we got from the teachers and seeing people’s costumes”.
Dressing up for World Book Day is a fun way to share our pleasure in reading a good book and recommending it to another. It is also a reminder of how lucky we are to have so many exciting books available to us to read and enjoy freely.
