20 ideas for World Book Day

With fun ideas for whole-school activities as well as lesson tasks, you'll find flexible suggestions that work in a range of different settings, whether you are a classroom teacher, head of department or a literacy lead.

Set up a pop-up book festival or a 'Big Draw' event, where students chalk their favourite characters from books in communal spaces around school. Create super-sized interactive displays for students to design.
Encourage students to become writers for the day with flash fiction experiments and celebrate random acts of bookish kindness.

Perfect for KS3-5.

Example ideas from the resource:

Big displays. Celebrate books and reading of all kinds with dramatic, large-scale displays on WBD. Create temporary graffiti walls using large rolls of paper and marker pens to encourage students to share their favourite books or characters. Bring in real tree branches and get students to add book reviews as ‘leaves’, or create a fantasy island map with students adding ‘Desert Island’ recommendations.

Extreme reading. Display pictures of students or staff reading in interesting or quirky places. Google ‘extreme reading’ for inspiration.

Little free library. Set up a little free library for a day by getting students and staff to donate unwanted books that anyone can freely take home, or curate book boxes which can be easily moved between tutor/form rooms and classrooms to encourage more reading every day in school.

Bring out the bunting. Decorate your classroom or hallways with bunting flags featuring book covers on one side and students’ comments on the reverse.

Great British Book Off. Hold book-themed quizzes and competitions (cakes optional). Give books as prizes if you can!

Vegimal book characters. Encourage younger students to create their own versions of famous book characters using playdoh, plasticine, sweets or even vegetables (with costumes and drawn-on faces).

All reviews

28/02/2021

The ideas sound great. I will implement some of them to spice up the reading culture at school. So far I have been taking my grade 10 class after every three weeks to the school library where I help them choose books which they can read in a stipulated amount of time. The entire hour is spent in the library and the students borrow the selected books, read at home and enter their review of the books in their journals. In addition they share their reviews with classmates.

23/02/2017

28/02/2021

23/02/2017