Library News 

Term 3 at BHHS has been a varied mixture of being briefly at school and then extended lockdown. Some of our major library activities like Book Week and Write a Book in a Day happened to fall in this term so have given us a focus to keep our students engaged and interested.

Book Week’s theme this year was ‘Old Worlds, New Worlds, Other Worlds’, reflecting many different genres and interests. We ran a series of daily competitions for students to earn house points, and some beautiful new YA books, and our special relationship with Lilydale Books gave us some book vouchers for our prize-winning borrowers. These prizes will be handed over when we are back at school.

WriteaBookinaDay is a fantastic project run over 12 hours when teams of students plan, write, illustrate and edit a digital book up to 5000 words long, to be read by young patients at The Children’s Hospital. Teams raise money for The Kids Cancer Project and this year we had six teams involved, with students from Years 7 through to 11, such a great commitment. It was a very long day, but all the students were able to sustain their interest and keep each other motivated to produce six beautiful, creative and funny stories, all produced online using Microsoft Teams. We are hopefully anticipating some more winners with our wonderful 2021 contributions, after one of our teams won the 2020 Best Book VIC/SA/TAS Upper School Prize last year!

Over the past few months, we have had time to devise a new library webpage, the Rainbow Connection, to support our LGBTQIA+ students. Along with our other webpages featuring Books and Wide reading and Online Resources and Research Skills, we feature news, and information, new books and collections of books to interest our students. While we were briefly open in week 2 we had a lunchtime launch of this page, with our Welfare staff and students in the library and a special new book display and rainbow lollies of course!

Wear it Purple Day was also a feature this term, August 27th.  And even though we were remote learning, students were encouraged to come to class in something purple; paint their nails, put some adornments in their hair, wear some purple clothes or accessories, or use purple text in the class chat. Wear it Purple strives to foster supportive, safe, empowering and inclusive environments for rainbow young people.  Students sent in photos of their purpleness on the day, as they had done the previous week for dress-up day for the Book Week theme. 

The CBCA Shadow Judging has been running all year with our 26 wonderful readers who have read and reviewed the collection of notable books for older readers. We have enjoyed our interactions with these students as they discuss which titles they liked and the mixed reviews for the book which ended up winning the 2021 prize, The End of the World is Bigger than Love by Davina Bell. 

We also hosted a fantastic online presentation by Erin Wamala, who is one of the official judges in the Older Readers Category at the CBCA. She spoke to our students about the winning books and revealed some interesting facts about how those choices are made. 

With the ongoing lockdown, we revived our tradition of hosting weekly Library Kahoot quizzes online. With their book/author/movie themes they have been very popular across all the year levels and we love engaging with the students as they win house points for their participation. BHHS students are always very competitive!