Yarra Junction Primary School (YJPS) showed off its love for literature during Book Week last week, where students met local authors, studied novels and dressed up as their favourite characters.
Bookending the week’s celebrations on Monday 25 August was the Book Week Parade which saw the entire school dress up as their favourite characters from the books they love.
YJPS principal Lisa Rankin said most of the school’s students and teachers dressed up in some truly creative and interesting outfits.
“We would have had probably 99 per cent of them all dressed up as well, which I think is a good sign of a school when preps through to year six all get into it.”
Students dressed up as a variety of classic characters from children’s literature: Fred Flintstone made an appearance (along with his famous car), Robin Hood was seen dashing about, plenty of Disney princesses dazzled and a couple of Harry Potter’s also turned up on the day.
But Ms Rankin said there were some out-of-the-box dress ups too.
“Some of the kids have been really into their footy and footy card books. So they were creative and made themselves into either AFL football card books or the actual cards.
“It was pretty impressive,” Ms Rankin said.
While the dress ups drew laughs and smiles from everyone on the day, Ms Rankin said the engagement from the students pointed towards a growing enthusiasm for reading.
“Some of our students who embrace… dressing up as the footy cards and things like that, it makes that authentic link between things that you really love, and reading as well.
Book Week began on Monday 18 August and local Dandenong Ranges authors Gina and Derek Braidner visited to discuss their new book, Puffing Billy, the Gift of the Forest.
Students not only studied the novels they were reading but also realised their own inner-author and storyteller through creative writing exercises, completing the “whole literary circle”.
“They celebrated that they were also authors, doing their writing pieces in different year levels and really building that connection between reading and writing, and [then] writing and reading,” Ms Rankin said.
The preps focused on farms as a theme for their writing, while the junior school examined Egypt.
Middle school students wrote about endangered species and the senior school flexed their literary muscles through works of gothic fiction.
“Having those themes each term is making our young students as authors unbelievable – the language that they’re using is really incredible and it’s something we’re super proud of at YJ.”
Ms Rankin said the idea of having the Book Week Parade on the last day of celebrations was to sow the seed in the students’ heads and build hype for the big day.
“So we build on that, and then we do our celebration day at the end, so that the kids have all had every opportunity to be able to get their costume ready and be immersed in that.”
Ms Rankin said Book Week ultimately highlighted both the joys of literature, and its utmost importance in the students’ ability to learn, think, express themselves and connect with others.
“You don’t have to be reading a novel. Whether it’s the newspaper or a magazine or a football card book, all of that is literature and all of that is vitally important for them and their lifelong skills as well.
“I think it means that it just opens the doors to everybody.”
