One of the key highlights in the Willow Park School Calendar has begun!
Book week is here, it started yesterday morning Monday 23rd of September and it will run until Friday 27th September.
The Book Fair is taking place place in the Hub at 8.30am every morning until 3.30 daily, with a break from 12-2pm. It will be finishing up at 9.15 on Friday.
For anyone that has been at the Book Fair already you will see that the hub is a hive of activity. It is full from the time of opening at 8.30am and boys are queing up to ask Mairead about their favourite genre or specific book. It is clear to see an enthusiasm and love of reading evident from the boys at the Book Fair. Even younger brothers and sisters are queing up to buy a book!
Once again, Quality Book Fairs will provide the books for the Fair. They will give us a 50% commission on all books we sell, so the more books we sell, the more books we can provide within the Willow Park classrooms, for Learning Support and for the library.
All boys will visit the Fair as a class if they don’t get a chance to come along in the morning. Parents are welcome to come in and browse or buy first thing in the morning or before class pick-up time and we will be there throughout the day. The Fair will be a similar layout to previous years and there should be a broad range of fiction and fact books to buy. It is Cash or Cheque only and there will be no credit card facility.
Some things for the boys to remember for Book Week:
- You will be coming to the Book Fair at the same day and time as you normally come to library each week, so instead of remembering to bring in your library book, please bring in at least €10 to buy a book.
- As we are not providing paper bags this year, it would be great if the boys could bring in a cloth bag or a small shopping bag to avoid books being lost once they are purchased.
- We will NOT be reserving books for boys if you forget your money. We will order a book if it is out of stock and have it in the following day for you but it must be paid for in advance.
Author visits
There was great excitement yesterday as Shane Hegarty visited they 2nd, 3rd and 4th class boys.
Each year-group will have at least one author coming in to the school to visit and read a story, discuss their book or talk about how they began writing. Books by all authors will be on sale at the Book Fair.The authors we have invited this year are:
- Shane Hegarty (2nd, 3rd and 4th) who is an author and former Irish Times journalist has written the Darkmouth series and has just recently published a new book called Boot for younger readers which has proven very popular in the library.
- A former Willow parent Peter Cosgrove (3rd) has self-published a book packed with puzzles, brain teasers, tricks and riddles called Fun Unplugged which was very popular with the boys last year.
- We are also hoping to get a visit from Gordon Darcy and Paul Howard(4th) who have co-authored a children’s book about rugby which will be released on 17th October this year.
- The ever-popular Ger Siggins (5th), famed for his Rugby novels and Atlantis United, with a second book in that series just recently released, Rugby Redzone.
- The hilarious and very entertaining author Dave Rudden (5th and 6th) who has written the Knights of the Borrowed Dark series.
- David McCullagh who is a political correspondent with RTE has written four history books, including two about Eamon De Valera. He will be talking to the 6th Form boys about writing with a particular emphasis on their Irish history curriculum from last year and this year.
- For the younger children in Jnr Infants to 1st Form, we will round off the week with a storyteller, Fiona Dowling, who was the 2016 Storyteller-in-Residence in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown libraries.
Classroom activities during Book Week to further encourage a lifelong love of reading
All the teachers will be engaging in literary based classroom activities with the boys throughout the week. There will be a prize-giving ceremony in the Hub on Friday morning for those boys who have done their best in their classroom at writing a story, poem or assigned piece.