On Thursday 6th March, everyone at The Willows celebrated World Book Day. Year 3 came dressed as their favourite book characters for the day and there were some incredible outfits! We spent the entire day off-timetable, celebrating our love of reading, our favourite books and taking part in lots of games, quizzes and discussions about books.

Year 3’s first challenge was to guess the ‘Masked Readers’, where the staff had all recorded themselves with their faces obscured by their favourite books and saying a short book review. There were some really tough ones, especially Mr Knight’s, who put on a really silly voice. The children then made their own book reviews and Mrs Wilks made a ‘Recommended Read’ folder with their ideas. 

At two different points throughout the day, all KS2 children took part in a story share, where 8 staff members read the first section of their favourite book for 20 minutes. The children got to choose who they went to listen too, with staff situated in different classrooms, the worship area, the hall and even the staffroom! The children swapped in the second session to have the chance to hear another reader and get tempted by another book.

One of the children’s favourite activities during the day was making their own ‘Story Stones’. The children were inspired by Mrs Wilks’ set of story stones that needed a spruce up and decided to separate the stones into characters, objects, settings and weather. Once our stones were complete we spent time in the sunshine making stories in teams using randomly selected stones! The all articulated their ideas brilliantly and definitely showed their amazing imaginations. 

Other activities we took part in were writing our favourite books on a new display board for the playground, watching the CBBC live lesson for World Book Day (but we unfortunately didn’t get a shout), creating our own bookmarks to commemorate World Book Day 2025 and working in pairs to complete an  A – Z character challenge where children had to think of a character from a book for each letter of the alphabet. 

Well done Year 3, we had a very busy day but it was brilliant sharing your love of books and love of reading with you!