World Book Day
To celebrate WBD at school, I carefully planned an assembly on Reading for Pleasure and significant books in my life to share with Year 10. And then promptly failed to email it in to work, so the head of IT did an assembly on not being a GTA addict instead, with a seamless link to WBD - suggesting that instead of picking up the Xbox controller, the students should pick up a book instead.
Despite this rather poor start, I had organised a competition with the staff to decorate their classroom doors with a book-related theme, which bore rather more impressive results. A special guest judge and I then scored each door on three aspects: how clear the book choice was to students, how creative the door was, and how much effort had been put in. Here are the top 3 prize-winning doors...
For my door, I chose to re-create both the exterior and interior of 221b Baker Street, based on the BBC series, Sherlock to make it more recognisable to students (I did suspend my university copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the interior diorama, just to make sure it was a book-related door, and not a TV one). This is what it looked like...
At lunchtime, we had a real life 'Where's Wally?' hunt in the library, where students had to record the location of 5 hidden Wallies to be entered into a prize draw. There were also some Wally activities that I found on the Scholastic site, and plenty of Where's Wally books for students to examine. This Wally-themed WBD was to help promote the Wally 'fun' run that was taking place the next day.
Where's Wally?
Friday 7th March. 3.30pm. 30ish Wallies running around Amesbury to raise money for The National Literacy Trust. The money is still coming in, so I will update you with how much we raised in the near future. Quite a few of the staff and students positioned themselves along the route to cheer us all on which was blooming LOVELY! We also got 'Facebook famous' with a mention on the 'Spotted in Amesbury' page! Was it fun? Sort of. The run itself was ok, but I still had to walk most of the death-hill... I did manage to run the rest though, and completed the route in 34 minutes. Seeing my colleagues dressed up as Wallies and jiggling around town - and the reactions we got - that was the fun part.
Sadly, I have not been for a run since, as the post-run night on the tiles ended with a rather nasty toe injury, that definitely counts as one of the messy bits that I said I wasn't going to mention! I'm hoping to start running again next week. Target 1: get comfortable with running 5k (including hills!); Target 2: start building up to 10k, so I can join in with all Emma's (Central Wally above) other silly runs!
Writing Comps
On Tuesday, I finished my first short story for a writing competition on the website, Movellas. It's a community of professional and wannabe writers where you can publish your writing, get feedback from readers/writers and enter competitions. The one I have entered is based on a YA novel called Who Framed Klaris Cliff? I found it quite challenging to tell the entirety of my story within the 3000 words limit, and I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out. If, however, I do win a prize, I might be tempted to share the story more publicly.
I'm now focussing my attentions on a poetry competition. I've got one poem down that I'm really quite pleased with, one that I think is a bit crap, and one that is still a little germ of an idea in my head. I've got until the end of the month to finish those off, but if any of them get selected, they will be published in a real book!!! If that happens, you will be among the first to know!
On that note, I should probably stop writing this, and get on with something more productive...
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