The Junior School celebrated World Book Day this year with two in-house visits from local poet A F Harrold and acclaimed author Helen Dunmore who won the first Orange prize for fiction in 1995.
Junior School girls celebrated World Book Day itself, Thursday 3 March, with local poet, Ashley Harrold. He read some of his very witty and funny poems in a special World Book Day Assembly and then hosted a series of workshops with Years 1- 4. After talking to the girls about what they kept in their ‘secret’ boxes, pupils in Years 2 and 3 made up a poem about a ‘magic box’ which could only hold intangible things such as, ‘the shooshing sound of turning pages’ and ‘the puffy whiteness of a cloud’. Year 4 girls wrote a poem about how they would run School if they were in charge; two suggestions were that the School day should only be an hour and that lunch would consist only of chocolate!
Mrs Raywood, Librarian, said, ‘The girls have really enjoyed the sessions and were asking when Ashley could come back again!
On Wednesday, 9th March, we were very fortunate to host a talk by prize-winning author Helen Dunmore. She gave a half an hour talk and readings from her 'Ingo' series to Year 5 and 6 girls, followed by a Q&A session where the girls asked her lots of question about her books and the process of writing itself. She encouraged the girls to never give up on their dreams to write, as it took her many years of writing before she had a book published. Finally she kindly signed books purchased by the girls.