SIS News

Book in a Day

Eight budding writers, editors and illustrators competed in the SIS Book in a Day challenge. Milly Cortese, Rubi Rose, Trinity Lee and Chloe Peipers as Year 10 students, brought their experience from previous years to the team. Milly took on the role of team captain, Trinity was the illustrator of the beautifully exceptional images, whilst Chloe became chief editor. Rubi wrote the blurb and back cover reviews and helped coordinate input of ideas. They were joined by the talented and enthusiastic Year sevens; Ruhani Kaushal, Alex Burd, Tristan Estrada and Gill Paramveer. All teams were given prompts that had to be included in the story. These were suggested by all students participating on the workshop day. Our students were given the following prompts:

Primary character 1 – Chef

Primary character 2 - Kid’s birthday party entertainer

Non-human character - Bigfoot

Setting - Kitchen of Buckingham Palace

Issue - New Year’s Resolution

5 Random words - qualify, epiphany, spiral, radio, coat-hanger

They had six hours to write over 4500 words to create a novel targeted at 12 to 14 Year olds.

Four south eastern regions of schools compete and each region has 4 to 5 schools in it. This includes most other Catholic and Independent schools in our area and beyond.

The works are then short-listed by students from one of the other regions participating through a voting system. Our Year sevens were joined by Matthew Sinclair who read the five books from the region we were assigned to judge.

A short list is then judged by The SIS Coordinator and Claire Hallifax, Director of Publishing at Scholastic.

We are very excited to announce that this year our school won with their heart-warming story about Bigfoot. We won $700 worth of books for our library, donated by Campion.

The Blurb

Life in the forest wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. For Bigfoot, it was the loneliest place on Earth. Surrounded by nothing but old junk and menacing birds, an escape was inevitable. When a New Year’s Resolution – turned – heart’s desire adventure puts him smack in the middle of Buckingham Palace, the opportunities are endless.

Bernadette McDermott

Romero E Learning Advisor