Library Corner

For us, the highlight of the year is always our celebrations for CBCA Children’s Book Week in term 3. This year we had back-to-back author talks, library activities, a morning tea and various other festivities… and what a week it was! We’re still exhausted, but it was so worth it.

The Library Monitors hosted a Book Week Quiz, Bookmark-Making Workshop, Book Hunt and Book Cover-Making Competition, and a group of brave students visited each year level assembly during the week to do some bookish trivia questions. Thank you very much to Anaelle Micciche, Orleanna Murray de Brossard, Lexi Nuelant, Sofia Johansson, Anjana Sivaraman, Caitlin Blair, Manasvi Shirgaonkar, Penny McNeill, Aimee Harris, Carmelle Kent, Tracey Kry, Georgia Wood-Freeman and Shruthi Sasi Kumar for all their help with these activities.

Congratulations to the following students who were awarded the prize of “Top Borrower” during each year level assembly throughout the week:

Year 7: Nicole Mazis (also the Top Borrower overall at GEC)

Year 8: Penny McNeill

Year 9: Grace Rockman

Year 10: Antoine Hobbs

Year 11: Shruthi Sasi Kumar

Year 12: Minhal Gill

ELC: Sunny Feng

Staff: Naomi Zander

These students won book vouchers for being such frequent and enthusiastic library patrons.

We also held a Book Club Open Day where regular book clubbers invited peers or teachers along to check out what we get up to in our fortnightly get-together. During our meeting, students chose to dress up as their favourite book character, perhaps out of nostalgia for their primary school book parade memories! We had Harry Potter, some manga characters, Auggie from Wonder and Katnis Everdeen among other esteemed literary guests.

Three authors visited for Book Week; Sammy J (Year 7s), Nova Weetman (Year 8s) and Cath Crowley (Year 9s). The feedback from these authors was very positive, with all three gushing about the behaviour and engagement of our students, and the interesting questions the students asked during the presentations. On the other side of things, students also expressed how exciting they found the author visits, and many brought along books to be signed.

Finally, we also held our very first D.E.A.R Day at GEC. Several times throughout the day, an announcement was made to “Drop Everything and Read!” All staff and students were required to carry something to read with them all day, and no matter what they were doing... they had to put down pens, pencils, laptops and textbooks and read something for pleasure. Even the students who had Phys Ed on the oval got involved!

The week before Book Week we held an incursion for Write a Book in a Day, where groups of students hunkered down in the library to write and illustrate their own books. The quality of the work they produced was astounding, and all of their books are now available to borrow in the GEC Library. A very big thank you to Justine Douglas for all the work she did in organising this event.

On Wednesday 29th August, the Book Club attended the Melbourne Writers’ Festival schools program to see a number of different author talks and literary events, including a presentation of “Anxiety: How to Deal” and another on “Creative Careers”. 40 students came along on this popular excursion, and found the day to be inspiring, empowering, and an opportunity to discover some great new reads.

We will keep our Book Week display up in the corridor window for the rest of this term, complete with shortlisted books from the CBCA Book of the Year awards. We were so happy to hear one of our favourite books won the prize for Older Readers: Take Three Girls by Cath Crowley, Simmone Howell and Fiona Wood. In the library this term we also had a science book display and film screening for Science Week, and last week on our front desk we showed off our various resources on technology and the internet for eSmart Week. We are always happy to create book displays or find resources on any celebration or educational awareness week.

Karys McEwen (Librarian) & Megan Gatt (Library Technician)