Drapers' Festival of Reading

Drapers’ Festival of Reading is an annual event which takes place across Drapers’ Multi-Academy Trust schools (Drapers’ Academy, Drapers’ Brookside Infant and Junior Schools, Drapers’ Maylands Primary School and Drapers’ Pyrgo Priory School).

The festival, which is now in its third year, has been established to develop a love for reading and is held every March to encompass World Book Day (held on Thursday 7th March 2024).

During the two-week period, pupils across the Trust are encouraged to read every day, logging pages, chapters and books. Prizes (vouchers and book bundles) are awarded to children across the Trust, from Nursery through to Sixth Form, celebrating those who are newly discovering a love for reading as well as those who are already prolific readers. As well as the variety of events taking place for pupils within the schools, we also encourage our wider community to broaden their depth of reading through book swaps and online competitions.

Each school has been implementing its own activities and initiatives during the festival. Drapers’ Academy held a ‘Book Race’ where pupils were challenged with reading and reviewing as many books as they could during the two-week window. Congratulations to all pupils who took part and huge congratulations to Megan in Year 10, who took 1st place. The school also ran a ‘Shelfie Selfie’ competition, where staff took photos of their bookshelves at home and pupils had to try and identify who they belonged to. Two special ‘Book Grab’ sessions took place after school, where pupils could help themselves to free books donated by the school library, this gave everyone the opportunity to choose a book to take home and keep.

We welcomed two fantastic authors to Drapers’ Academy. First, we welcomed the entertaining Neal Zetter to run workshops with our Year 7 pupils. Neal is a London-based comedy performance poet, author, entertainer and educator with a huge following in schools. He has been using his interactive, fun and accessible poetry to develop literacy, confidence and communication skills in people aged 3 to 103 for nearly 30 years. His hilarious poetry books cover all ages of children and have won him awards and recognition e.g. Wishing Shelf Awards, Book Trust and The Reading Agency. Neal worked with our Year 7 pupils, focussing on the importance of confidence in communication through poetry and performance.

We then welcomed author Nicholas Kasparis, a local author from Clayhall in Essex, to run sessions with our SEND pupils. Nicholas has been a teacher for over 20 years and in that time, he has taught every age group at Primary and Secondary school, from 4-year-olds to 18-year-olds, so he was very much at home as he ran workshops with the pupils, focusing on his book Ralph and Robort.  

In Drapers’ Maylands Primary School, a ‘Catch Me Reading’ competition took place, where pupils were encouraged to take their favourite book out into the playground with them to read, some children chose to read on the grass, some whilst standing on one leg, and some even chose to sit and read whilst resting safely on the climbing equipment! The school asked Parents and Carers to continue the reading festival activities at home through a ‘Create Reading Spots Competition’ which encouraged parents to send a photograph into the school, capturing their children reading in a creative spot at home.

The pupils of Drapers’ Maylands Primary School also took part in a ‘Most Creative Costume Competition’ where pupils and staff could dress as their favourite book character.

At Drapers’ Brookside Infant and Junior Schools there has been an array of reading-centred activities taking place during the festival. Teachers in the schools have been swapping classes during ‘Teacher Swaps’, seeing Junior and Infant teachers reading to new groups of pupils. The schools also introduced shared reading sessions where Junior children read with the Infant children, showing great collaboration between the schools.

Drapers’ Pyrgo Priory School thoroughly embraced the festival this year. For World Book Day the school’s theme was ‘Fairy Tales’ and each year group was given a selection of classic fairy tales to read aloud to their classes such as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel'. The children loved joining in with their favourite parts of the stories and discussing the themes and deeper meanings behind them. There were also plenty of opportunities for drama and role play to bring the stories to life and allow the children to step into the role of the characters. The teachers tasked pupils with a writing task for the day where they were asked to create a class poem that was based upon their chosen fairy tale and the children then shared and performed these poems in a special assembly.

Another highlight for Drapers’ Pyrgo Priory School was their popular ‘book parade’! This is where staff and pupils were invited to show off their costumes and to see how many book characters they could spot. This always brings a real sense of community within the school and is a whole lot of fun!

An inter-school reading competition took place across all the Drapers’ Multi-Academy Trust schools, with a prize awarded to the pupil who read the most books during the two-week festival. A big congratulations to all our winners.

Trudy Spillane

“This year’s Drapers’ Festival of Reading has been fantastic. Pupils in all our schools have shown enthusiasm and a real passion for reading which has been wonderful to see. We hope to have re-invigorated a love of reading in our schools’ communities and hope that the joy for reading that we have seen over the past few weeks continues. Many of our schools have arranged author visits throughout the year so we are looking forward to these. Well done to all the pupils, teachers, parents and carers for making this a truly successful and inspiring event."