Why we love World Book Day

World Book day is one of our favourite days of the school year! It’s a day that a lot of schools take part in, inviting all their students to dress up as their favourite character from a book.

This encourages reading books and talking at home to parents about magical stories. They might discuss which character they would like to be. Also parents have to get creative about how to create the costumes. We can just imagine all the stressed out parents the night before, battling with some felt material and a needle and cotton!

This year Zest was teaching that day in a primary school in West London. The school were happy for us to choose the book to base our dance workshops on. But it was soooo hard to pick a book – as there are just so many wonderful books and characters that inspire us to create dance….

In the end we picked three books, and taught different dance workshops for different KS1 and KS2 years.

• Reception, year 1 and year 2 classes, we did Matilda by Roald Dahl 

There is great music we used for it, from the Matilda musical which a lot of the children had been to see in the West End on stage. The kids loved playing naughty school children in the dance workshop, getting one over on the strict teacher character!

• Years 3 and 4 we did Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

So many characters to choose from for this great story. We all became little pickpockets and street urchins learnt a dance to the song ‘Got to pick a pocket or two’!

• Years 5 and 6 we did Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare

We wanted to pick a more challenging book for the oldest years, and as they had studied Shakespeare recently at the school we thought it’d be good to link that in for them. We had dramatic dancing with lots of sword fighting, poison drinking, ott dying and some beautiful music from Tchaikovsky

It was a great day all round.

We have also taught a Roald Dahl themed day, and a Julia Donaldson themed day at different schools. Have a look at our blogs to see how we were inspired there.

Here are some funny pics i’ve come across of other children dressing up for their world book day. Where’s Wally and Harry Potter are popular characters, and I love it when all the teachers get involved too…