World Book Day 2021: Building a Love of Books Virtually
One Education Ltd
Empowering school leadership teams to enhance the quality of education for young people.
Every year, the first week of March brings World Book Day! This year, things are a little different to say the least. Although this week brought news of full school opening and the roadmap out of all this, we’re still faced with a World Book Day in lockdown. Thankfully, books and a love of reading can transcend the current situation, enabling us to visit new worlds, explore new places and experience new things. Books have always been a vehicle for this and this year this is even more important.
World Book Day is a chance to celebrate the unending power of books. Although books should be celebrated every day, not just on World Book Day, the worldwide focus allows us to all come together and share our love of reading. The benefits of Reading for Pleasure are well-known, yet still too few children do not enjoy reading. The National Literacy Trust report into Reading before and during the COVID-19 lockdown, showed an encouraging trend, with the percentage of children saying they enjoyed reading increasing from 47.8% to 55.9%. However, that still leaves almost half of all 9-18 year olds not enjoying reading. Many schools are doing sterling work to build a love of Reading, but we still must do more, and World Book Day is one way in which to help. By committing to encouraging every child to love reading, we can positively affect wellbeing, empathy, cultural capital, communication, attainment and life chances.
This graphic from The Reading Agency’s Literature Review: The impact of reading for pleasure and empowerment report (2015) shows just how many areas of life reading for pleasure can impact:
Celebrating World Book Day can make a huge difference to your pupils and their enjoyment of reading. It has the power to make reading accessible and exciting. Every school does it differently, but what’s important is that we encourage every single child to find a book they love and encourage them to enjoy reading. So, however you do it, celebrating World Book Day is a must! We know that planning your event this year is made more challenging by lockdown, but one of the great things about books is that they can be accessed and celebrated in so many different ways!