Children’s Book Week

From Alice, Librarian and Book Week Coordinator

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a school in possession of an enthusiastic reading community, must be in want of a massive Children’s Book Week celebration. This year the theme of Book Week was Reading is Magic and we sure have had a magical time. From magical classroom displays, to author visits, parent readers, writing workshops and theatre productions, and of course the annual dress up day parade. North Melbourne Primary School answered the call and made Book Week truly magical.

Tournament of Books

From Kim, Year 6 teacher

This year was our first ever Tournament of Books! Errol St Library sessions were devoted to a picture book-off that Year 3 - 6 participated in. Eight books were chosen from our lovely librarian, Alice, with each week a new duo facing off. Students voted on their favourites of the two and the winner progressed to the next round. The final two books were Dragons Love Tacos and Mr Huff. To help demonstrate the battle, Mark and Kale (our P.E. teachers) engaged in a riveting game of rock, paper, scissors, with Dragons Love Tacos coming in first place! We hope to extend this new tradition across both campuses next year.

Classroom displays

From Mike, Literacy Learning Specialist

This year's theme for Book Week was 'Reading is Magic', so teams were tasked with the job of creating classroom displays around 'Magical Worlds'. Judging them was incredibly hard this year. Both Alice and myself were hugely impressed by the quality of every year group's efforts. Our main criteria were:

Use of physical space

Student effort

Links to learning

Visual Impressiveness

On the Errol Campus, we were haunted by the dark, gothic glimpse into the world of Bram Stoker's Dracula created by the Y6 students. The Y5s took us on a whistle stop tour of the

sights of Harry Potter, and some of their own magical realms. The Y4s got a very close second place, stealing our hearts with their stunning word choice in their poems inspired by 'The Magic Box' by Kit Wright, but it was the Y3 students that stole the crown with their incredible representation of Oz, full of brilliant work on visualisation from key scenes and character descriptions.

On the Molesworth Campus, The Preps took us on a beautiful journey through fairy tales and characters, and the Y2s shared some of their own magical realms with us. The Y1s transported us into the wonderful world of the Faraway Tree, so effectively, that the judges could not believe that they were still in school. Well done to the winning Y1s!

Dress up day

From Alice

They say that good things come in 3s and that was true of our school staff dress ups- we had 3 bears, 3 little pigs and 3 Little Red Riding Hoods, surely an auspicious sign of a wonderful dress up day.

The staff dress up competition winners were the Grade 6s as Dune characters, and the Grade 1s as the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice. It was a tough competition this year, with all teams doing an incredible job.

We also had hundreds and hundreds of incredible student dress ups, from the elaborate to the very simple. We would like to thank all our families for getting into the Book week spirit. The Dress up day is always a wonderful opportunity for the students to open up conversations about their favourite books.

Molesworth Meerkat Production performance

Last Thursday the Molesworth Campus students enjoyed a theatre adaption of the CBCA picture book of the year, Timeless by Kelly Canby. The show explored the theme of “quality time” Everyone loved the silly singing and dancing and the set was incredible, including the puppet shop keeper.

Lachlan Carter

By Leni, Medina and Amelia, 5F

Hi we are Leni, Medina and Amelia from Year 5, this term we had an author visit with Lachlan Carter. It involved a lot of creativity and teamwork. We learnt how to plan out writing in a successful way, using booklets and story boards. We even started using idea and problem/solution boards.

Everyone had to bring an every day item so we could use them as seeds in our writing, we pretended they were alive and angry about something. We wrote our own mini booklets about our fictional character, mine was an angry banana! Leni’ and Amelia’s was a hilarious cookie tin.

100 story building visit

From Frankie & Mia, Year 3D

Last week, a small group of Year 3 students visited the 100 Story Building, in Footscray. When we arrived at the building we sat down and got introduced to the educators Meg and Liz.

They took us through the history of the building. They told us that the building was constructed upside-down and there were 100 levels below us.

We went to our tables and were given an object from some of these levels with a little note attached.

Then we drew what we imagined our level to look like and created characters that lived there. We shared our ideas and Meg and Liz were very impressed with our creativity.

Katrina Nannestad

By Heidi & Hazel, 6E

Last week on Friday, our class was lucky enough to be invited to an author visit, featuring Katrina Nannestad. She spoke about some of her award winning books, including “We are wolves”, “Rabbit, Solider, Angel, Thief”, and “Waiting for the storks”.

She spoke about their meaning, and their genres, and why she was inspired to write in the first place. All the classes were intrigued on the subjects she spoke about. Some students asked rather interesting questions too about how she titles her books and about the Lebensham program, and we talked about a lot of controversy, like if we would steal from a wealthy family to survive.

All the students were certainly entertained by the author visit, and were enlightened by her knowledge of the war and people’s struggles during that time. Thanks to Katrina Nannestad for coming to NMPS to teach the Year 6 about your books.

Joel McKerrow

Year 3 and 4 had writing workshops with Joel McKerrow, a poet who has written his first very spooky children’s book, "The Dreaded Mr Snipe". Joel showed the students how to use poetry in their own writing.

“It was really great and fun, Joel made poems really fun and showed us a lot of characters and his own comic book” Teddy 3D

“Joel was making lots of connections between his book and other things like Stranger Things!” Maya 3D

“I really liked him performing his poetry, dropping the beat and bringing it back, and everyone was clapping along” Frankie M 3D

Year 5 News

Authors Katrina Nannestad and Lachlan Carter visit