Monday 24th June marked the start of our annual Festival of Reading celebrations at Sacred Heart! We came together as a community to celebrate the joy of reading, with a number of wonderful literary events, prizes and gifts.
All week long, our Festival of Reading joined with the Ethos team for a sponsored read, aptly named: ‘Hearts for Reading’. Students made a pledge to read for a set number of hours and money raised will go to St Cuthbert’s Care. Every lunchtime during the week, the library became a quiet space for our charitable readers to comfy down with a good book.
The library was a great space to also host a ‘Percy Jackson: Myths and Monsters’ lunchtime on Tuesday, where Ms Bossons provided a range of activities for fans of The Classics.
The week also included some wonderful ‘book gifting’: all of our Year 7 students received a free book, and some of our Year 7&8 students won a golden ticket entitling them to another book gift and chocolate! For those whose appetite for reading hadn’t yet been satisfied, the week-long Scholastic Book Fair offered more opportunities to purchase young adult and teen fiction. Our form time paired readers received vouchers on Tuesday morning to purchase a free book, to celebrate their great efforts with reading to their peers.
Our Author Visits were a great opportunity for girls from Years 7-10 to engage with real writers, get books signed, and purchase their most recent publications. On Friday, the author Nadine Aisha Jassat visited the Year 7s to talk about her fabulous verse novel, ‘The Hidden Story of Estie Noor’. The girls brought along their free copies of the book to read along with the author and get a personal autograph.
A book-themed treasure hunt took place on Wednesday lunchtime and was a great success! Girls used book-based clues to make their way through different departments across school, in a race to win the treasure!
Ms McCabe’s now legendary Poetry Slam took place in the library; an opportunity for girls to share their own poems, or favourite poems, with other budding writers. Some of our teachers got involved too, and the atmosphere was both warm and supportive.
Our Year 7 budding spelling champions took part in Miss Milburn’s ‘Spelling Bee’ competition – representing their forms in the final heats of a year-long interform competition which tests both vocabulary and spelling knowledge.
Tilly, our school dog, has had a busy week with KS3 students reading lots of different types of fiction to her. Everyone who read was excellent and students enjoyed a hot chocolate, while Tilly enjoyed some treats!
On Friday afternoon the whole school settled in to ‘drop everything and read’: classes were gifted a copy of the chilling and tension-building short story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’. There was even an Audible-style version available, featuring some of our budding teacher-actors as narrator and characters; the girls had fun guessing the voices!
A great week for us all to celebrate the fantastic reading culture we foster so well at Sacred Heart!
