Book Week 2020 – Activity Ideas

I don’t know about you, but Book Week has kind of snuck up on me this year. I went from super organised to, oh, it’s not happening until October, I’ll prepare later. The new dates means Book Week is being celebrated in the three schools I am working in this year fromĀ 17th to the 23rd of October.

More details are available on the CBCA website.

Here are some of the ideas for activities during, before (and maybe even after) Book Week this year. Most of them are pretty easy to throw together, especially if you are in a rush like I was.

Display Ideas

Story Box Library Activity Pack

God bless the team at Story Box Library. They send out a link to the most AMAZING teacher resource kit for Book Week. Download it here. It is chock full of amazing activity ideas. I have done the Solve A Curious Message in two of my schools. The students are LOVING it. They might be going a little crazing trying to solve them all! I cut out the 11 clues and stuck them up around the library, so the students must first find and then solve each of the 11 puzzles. And they are not easy. The students have been reading the shortlist books to find the answers, teaming up and generally having lots of fun.

The kit also includes a digital escape room plan, a letter template for writing to a curious creature, and so much more.

Creature Hunts

Find and Name the Characters

Last term, students at one of my schools had lots of fun trying to find and then name 12 characters from books as part of our Mystery In the Library weeks. They all happen to be creatures (some of them rather curious) ((except for Wally, but he’s a curious kind of guy, so I think it’s all good)), so I am planning to use this same hunt in one of my other schools during Book Week. To make this character hunt I cut character silhouettes from card and hung them around the library. Some were pretty tricky. You can find more information about this character hunt here.

Curious Creatures Around the School

We have printed a few copies of Gwyn Perkins’ amazing Book Week artwork and attached it to a message that says “Well done. You found some curious creatures. Return this to the library to collect your prize.” We are going to hide them around the school each day during Book Week. The students are already looking forward to this, asking me “are the creatures out there yet?”.

STEAM Activities

Our library makerspaces are always extra busy during Book Week. Here are some of the super easy activities we are running. All templates and instructions can be easily found on the web.

    • Origami animal corner bookmarks
    • Animal masks
    • Pipe cleaner curious creatures (had so, so much fun doing this the week before Book Week. Students had to create their creature plan first and draw it before starting construction. Our inspiration was these dragons from Frugal Fun 4 Boys. Ours didn’t look quite the same, but we had lots of fun.

 

 

Guessing Comps

It has become a tradition at one of my schools to always run Guess The Teacher, Guess The Book and Quote Quest competitions during Book Week. The absolute best thing about these are that they are run and created by our Year 12 students as part of their leadership service. They always come up with the most amazing ideas. The Guess the Teacher uses book-related clues that students must decipher to guess which teacher it is (things like what they like to read, have read recently). The Guess the Book is a clue that might reference a title, author, or major plot points to help students guess which book it is. The Quote Quest is made up of quotes from books and authors that fit the theme. Students have to complete the quotes or write down which author/book the quote is from. I usually put up nice pictures of the quotes around the library to help the students find the answers.

And I really, really wanted to do a “Guess How Many Curious Creature Eyeballs are in the jar” guess comp using eyeballs made from table tennis balls and paint (like these here), but wasn’t if it was too gross. Thoughts?