We spent the first week of March celebrating World Book Day in secondary, with all pupils taking part in reading-related house competitions, to win points for their house. Activities including a daily ‘Guess the Book’ challenge in which tutor groups had to battle it out to work out the title of a book, just by seeing one quote. It was a tough battle with Romero and Mandela tying the week overall.

On World Book Day itself, pupils and staff (albeit from home!) were able to dress up as a character from their favourite book, with Ms Purslow unrecognisable in her costume as Gandalf from Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’. There were definitely a few perplexed faces when she popped up on camera in her live lessons dressed like that!

Pupils all attended a virtual DEAR (drop everything and read) session with their tutors in the afternoon of World Book Day itself, and were lucky enough to get to hear from Bali Rai, acclaimed author, who is coming to SMA on 17^th March to deliver some reading and writing workshops to pupils. He left us a personal message sharing his journey of how he became an author, why is he promoting more diversity in children’s’ fiction and why reading is so important for everyone’s development.  Pupils then got to read some excerpts from his best-selling novels, including the football series ‘Dream On’ and ‘Game On.’ We can’t wait to meet him in person soon!