Over to Hannah …

World Book Day is an annual event celebrated by schools and libraries across the UK and Ireland, meant to instil a love of reading in young people from an early age and create a generation of life-long readers. At SGGS, many of our students are already avid readers, and we love to celebrate this every year through events and challenges.

It was unavoidable that World Book Day 2021 would have to be a little different from other years, but, when thinking about what to do, we knew we didn't want to sacrifice the usual whole school community feeling of the day. After lots of lunchtime Teams calls, the Year 12 Subject Ambassadors for English and Mrs Brooks chose a selection of 21 novels from around the world, celebrating diversity and exploring lots of different cultures within literature.

On the 1^st of March, a Teams group for the whole school went live, with a channel for discussion of each of the 21 books. These range from French modern classic ‘Le Petit Prince’ for Key Stage 3 to discuss, to contemporary novels such as ‘The Kite Runner,’ set in Afghanistan, for Key Stage 4 and ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Columbian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Key Stage 5.

Alongside these online book clubs there is a cake competition in each house, and we can’t wait to see what students are going to make! On World Book Day itself, students have had an assembly in tutor time, as well as book quizzes, put together by the Year 12 English Ambassadors.

We’re excited to see what the school community has to say about all the chosen novels, as we know if there’s one thing SGGS students love to do it’s talk about good books and come up with wonderful ideas and interpretations. Hopefully everyone will discover something new and, most importantly, have fun reading!