Ideas For Celebrating Book Week

You can find more ideas for celebrating book week on my current post for 2011 here – Book Week Activities 2011 – Ideas for CBCA Shortlisted Book.

Children's Book Week August 2009 Melbourne

The Children’s Book Council of Australia has a page dedicated on its website for ideas on how to celebrate Book Week. These are ideas submitted from schools all aroudn the country and ranges from teachers notes on shortlisted books for the CBCA awards, Book Week Passports and the Junior Judges Project (now closed but you can see what books that the children selected as winners for 2009 here).

I thought I would add to this list with some ideas on how I you can celebrate Book Week with your children. Naturally it isn’t related only to celebrating Book Week, but enjoying books and reading in general. I would love to hear what you are doing for Book Week in the comments below.

Ideas For Celebrating Book Week With The Family:

  • If you haven’t visited the library for a while, take the kids to visit your local library. Take the opportunity to seek out new authors, new series and genres.
  • Start a family favourite book register. This is something that we have started this year. In a notebook we have written everyone’s name, age and their favourite books at this moment in time. This will provide a concise history of our reading habits over the years and for me it will be a great reference guide as to what books the kids are reading at what ages. So as the younger ones, age and are looking for books to read, they can use the notebook for inspiration.
  • With the younger children, set up a home library around the book shelf and role play “librarians”.
  • For older children, have them research their favourite authors online. Ask them to find out facts like:
    – Why they started writing?
    – What other books they have written?
    – What authors do they like?
  • For the computer literate children, teach them how to search their library’s online catalogue from home and reserve books that they would like to read.
  • Have each child choose a book to read aloud together. For novels the child may choose a favourite passage.

How have you been celebrating book week?