The Power of a Good Book

As we said in our primary campus Monday assembly, Book Week is a memorable time of the year in most schools, and is up there with Christmas for some people! Book week and dressing up as one of our favourite characters is great fun for our primary students and always an event that our students look forward to.  This year we also had more secondary students than ever get dressed up.  Reading has been and always will be a simple experience that can be life-changing – it helps us to connect and make sense of our own experiences, with other people, and with the world around us. Book Week is much more than about dressing up though. It provides a platform to expose young (and older people) to quality Australian literature. We are fortunate in Australia that there is a strong appreciation for literature, and some outstanding authors that create texts that engage and inspire our young people. Since 1946, the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) have continued to provide an annual structure for celebrating quality texts by Australian authors. Looking back through the years, Christobel Mattingly, Alan Baillie, Colin Thielie, Emily Rodda, Margaret Wild, Shaun Tan, and Graeme Base are names across the last few decades that many of us may recognise as featuring as shortlisted books by the CBCA. We hope that book week provides an opportunity for families to share or discuss books that they have connected with overtime.  

This week I had the pleasure of reading two of the shortlisted books to our Kinder to year 2 and years 3 to 6 assemblies – ‘We Love You Magoo’ and ‘Norton and the Bear’ to an audience of book week ‘characters’. Norton and the Bear by Gabriel Evans is a simple, but very clever picture book that cuts across age groups looking at themes of conformity, individuality and belonging with a number of relatable messages for our students. This year we had many secondary students and staff engaging in book week at a level we hadn’t seen before following the suggestions of our student board. In speaking with our younger students, I said we could attribute this to the ‘magic’ and excitement that they bring to our school for book week every year and they were ‘spreading’ this to our secondary campus. Sure enough, when talking with our secondary students, many of them were almost nostalgic when recalling the characters that they remember dressing up as when they were primary students!