Book Week at SKiPPS

We love celebrating Book Week at SKiPPS - we love it so much that it splills over into 3 weeks! The festivities have started with our fabulous Book Week display that Amy has created - can you Guess Who from the staff selected each book as their favourite? You can come and see this wonderful display with your children after school, it is located just outside the staffroom door.

Author Visits

Our Book Week celebrations are continuing, and we are very excited to be welcoming a wonderful line-up of Australian authors to SKiPPS this year!

Each class will have the opportunity to meet an author, hear about their books and discover what happens behind the scenes as an idea develops into a story and eventually becomes a published book. These visits provide such a wonderful opportunity for our students to see that the books they enjoy reading are created by real people with ideas, imagination and a love of stories.

We were thrilled to kick off our author visits yesterday when Andrea Rowe joined our Foundation and Year 1 students. Andrea is the proud author of Jetty Jumping, Sunday Skating, In the Rockpool and many other wonderful books. Our students were incredibly engaged as Andrea shared her stories and talked about where her ideas come from and how they make their way onto the page. It was wonderful to see their excitement as they listened to the stories behind the stories! 

This week, we are delighted to welcome Wendy Orr, author of Nim's Island, Dragonfly Song and many more books, who will be working with our Year 4–6 students. This visit is particularly exciting for many of our students, as Nim's Island was studied as a class novel by our Year 3 and 4 students a couple of years ago. What a fantastic opportunity to meet the author behind a story they know so well!

Our final author visit for the year will be Chrissie Perry, who will be joining our Year 2 and 3 students. I am particularly excited about Chrissie's visit for two reasons! Firstly, I taught her son here at SKiPPS many years ago, and secondly, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Chrissie's Penelope Perfect series with my own girls when they were younger. It is always a special experience when our personal connections with books and authors come full circle!

We value these author visits enormously. We see first-hand how engaged our students become when they meet the people behind the stories they know and love. Each year, we work hard to connect with authors who we know our students and community will enjoy, while also providing opportunities for them to learn more about the writing and publishing process.

Meerkat Productions

Our Book Week celebrations continued yesterday with a fantastic visit from Meerkat Productions, who returned to SKiPPS to bring two of this year's Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year shortlisted books to life.

Across two highly entertaining performances, students enjoyed theatrical adaptations of Dear Broccoli by Jo Dabrowski and Inked by Karen Wasson. 

With plenty of humour, energy, music and audience participation, the Meerkat performers had students thoroughly engaged and laughing along as the stories jumped from the page to the stage.

We were also particularly honoured to have Jo Dabrowski join us for the performance of Dear Broccoli, sitting alongside some of our youngest students as they watched her wonderful book being brought to life on stage. It was a real thrill to have the author herself sharing the experience with us and seeing the students' reactions as her characters and words were transformed into a live performance.

It was another wonderful way to celebrate Book Week and to build excitement around great Australian children's literature, giving our students the opportunity to experience books and storytelling in a completely different form.

A huge thank you to Meerkat Productions for another fun and memorable visit to SKiPPS, and to Jo for making the occasion even more special by joining us.

Book Week dress-up parade

We will then bring our Book Week celebrations to a very colourful conclusion with our Book Week Dress-Up Parade on Friday 28 August at 9am. We can't wait to see the incredible characters and costumes our students bring to life! Please see the images below for some costume inspiration. 

We will also unveil the SKiPPS winner of the Best 2026 Children's Picture Book from the CBCA selcetion.

 All classrooms have a copy of these books and students will vote on their favourite over the coming weeks.

Thank you to Amy Salter who has organised these fabulous events and celebrations for our school.

Jac Morphy

Assistant Principal - Curriculum and Instruction