World Book Day

National Awareness Days.com is raising awareness of World Book Day that’s taking place at the beginning of March.

The main idea is to encourage children to start enjoying reading at an early age, so that they carry on this enjoyment into adulthood!

What’s so great about reading anyway? For a start, reading and writing are at the heart of learning and communication – essential for raising smart kids! There can be a more serious side because we read newspapers to find out about important world affairs.

But we can also escape, find excitement, love, and adventure in fiction. A good book can take us to a different place altogether, and is basically just a lot of fun!

So, National Book Tokens is sponsoring the day and encouraging schools everywhere to take part. A schools’ pack will be mailed out from mid January onwards with your £1 book tokens. Bookshops all over the UK will happily accept them.

The pack will also contain ideas about fun events and activities you can arrange for your pupils on the day. You could suggest holding a World Book Day assembly in advance, so everyone is in the know about this great day.

Make a huge transformation to kids lives with your raised funds by donating them to a sponsor charity. Book Aid International sends 500,000 books to libraries in sub-Saharan African and Palestine to make sure everyone has the same access to good quality books.

World Book Day also supports Readathon, the UK’s national sponsored reading event, which gets children actively reading. As well as raising money to help seriously ill children, participating schools get free books from Scholastic Book Clubs.

In the UK and Ireland World Book Day is on Thursday 5 March 2015 according to the Worldbookday.com website.

Most of the Schools’ Pack content is migrating online for 2015 and registration to access the new WBD Portal is required. The Portal is designed to be helpful to schools and libraries, but there is no restriction and it can be accessed following registration by anyone from any country.

The events listing on the worldbookday.com site will tell you what other schools, bookshops and libraries in the UK and Ireland are planning and you may get ideas from this list that you can apply in your school. The main objective for World Book Day is to have fun and enjoy reading and sharing books together, so please feel free to use these ideas as a starting point and add other ideas you have yourself.

For more information go to: World Book Day or National Awareness Days

Written by Rachel Harrison, speech and language therapist, on behalf of Integrated Treatment Services. www.integratedtreatmentservices.co.uk