Out of the Box

Library News

It was so lovely to reopen the doors at the beginning of Term 4 and catch up with students about all the ‘remote reading’ that had occurred. 

 

In October, we organized a ‘crazy hair day’ for Year 7’s to mark this year’s Book Week theme ‘Curious Creatures, Wild Minds’. We also visited each Year 7 class to deliver a one hour book week themed quiz and award prizes to students with the craziest hair and to the winning quiz team from each Year 7 form group. 

 

As part of our celebrations, we awarded some brand new young adult books. Generously donated by Lilydale Books, these were awarded to students who continually took part and engaged in the many different opportunities and events that we ran during the remote learning period.

 

A huge congratulations to…. 

  • Year 7: Henry Spink – excellent participation in Book Club and the CBCA Shadow Judging Program
  • Year 7: Noor Ayaz – Book Club, CBCA and Write a Book in a Day
  • Year 8: Tanvi Mishra – Book Club
  • Year 8: Beth Foley – Book Club and CBCA Shadow Judging
  • Year 9: Anouk Harper – Write a Book in a Day and CBCA Shadow Judging
  • Year 9: Abdullah Ayaz – Book Club, CBCA Shadow Judging
  • Year 9: Miko Tay – Write a Book in a Day & CBCA Shadow Judging
  • Year 10: Agam Johal – CBCA Shadow Judging
  • Nate Thomas & Tara Fox, Rish Deb Year 7 – Book Club & CBCA Shadow Judging
  • Amy Gao & Liam Lee Year 9 – Fabulous readers / engaged and recommends books for library
  • Imogen Steele Year 8 - Fabulous reader / CBCA Shadow Judging

More celebrations followed as the winners for the Write a Book in a Day competition were announced. One of our teams took out the top prize of Best Book in the Upper School category in Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria region. Congratulations to team Noveltea and the students Jessica Tran, Cynthia Chen, Wendy Huang, Lucy Wu, Isabella White and Megan Choo. 

This 12 hour writing competition took place during remote learning in Term 3 and we would like to congratulate all of the 7 teams and 42 students who took part to create, illustrate and publish seven 5000 word books in 12 hours via TEAMS. All books that were published went into hospitals around Australia for children undergoing treatment and all money raised went to the charity Kids Cancer Project. 

 

The second event that was planned to celebrate Book Week this year was our participation in the CBCA Shadow Judging Pilot Program where 28 students shadow judged the 6 books nominated for the Children’s Book Council Awards (CBCA) in the Older Readers Category. Students who participated, read and critiqued each book before coming together remotely via TEAMS to discuss the merit of each book and make a collaborative decision as to which book they believed should be awarded the top prize.  

This discussion demonstrated how passionate our students are about the books they read and went for over 2 and a half hours before deciding on the book ‘The Boy Who Steals Houses’. While this was not the winning book, our students were able to apply the judging criteria to each of the books to have a mature and focused discussion while listening to each other’s viewpoints and, work collaboratively on this project. We would like to publicly congratulate everyone who was involved in the project and hope that you might consider being part of it again next year. 

 

This term also saw the start of our Christmas Charity Appeal where we asked students and their families to contribute pasta, rice and any tinned food for FareShare – a charity that cooks over 15,000 meals a week to those in need. We would like to sincerely thank the Box Hill High School community for all their contributions. 

Finally, we would like to wish you all a fabulous and safe Christmas and New Year filled with lots of holiday reading. 

 

- Dee McQueen, Kylie Pearson and Ying Yu

Library team