Ways to Celebrate Book Week

Book Bingo

A simple game that can be done within a class or across the school where students need to cross off books on their book bingo card. Teens need to find or read a book with a black cover, published before 2000 or that has been turned into a movie. Kids need to find a book about a frog, with a bike on the cover or set in another country. Make your own bingo boards or check out some of the different free downloadable options available online.

Character parade

You can do it by the book and hold a traditional book week parade, asking students to come dressed as their favourite character or author. This is a great chance for teachers to demonstrate just how clever they are.

Book Swap

Staff and students bring in pre-loved books. For every book you donate, you can choose a book to take home. Or turn it into a fundraiser and charge $1 per book with all the proceeds going to the school library to buy new resources.

Read-a-thon

A simple way to celebrate books is by encouraging kids to read as many as possible. There are companies who can organise a fundraiser for you or you can organise them in-house.

Reward students who read by the book or by the page, and offer students time in class to read or set aside an entire day during book week for kids to wear their PJs, bring in a cushion and their favourite books and spend the day reading.

Treasure Hunt

Using bingo cards or make your own to create a list of books for students to discover in the classroom, library, or at home. Include a book with precisely 100 pages, a book written by someone called Dave, or a book with a blue spine, for example!

You can get older students to go a little deeper and ask them to find books with a certain theme, LGBTGIA+ characters, or science books written by Indigenous Australians, for example, and have students write reflections on how different people or marginalised groups are represented.

Student book reviews

Encourage students to each write a 50-word review for their favourite novels or books and then pin them up around the classroom, school, or library to encourage book sharing!

Who Am I

Get each student to write down the name of a relatively famous character from a book and use them for a game of Who Am I. Standing in a circle, each student is given a mystery name and they take it in turns asking the rest of the class a ‘yes or no’ question until they guess their character.

Establish a Free Little Library

Ask a handy parent to build or donate a cupboard or bookshelf and establish a Free Little Library on the school grounds. It could be for parents and staff or students (or everyone) with the community donating books to the library for others to take and keep or return.

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