Working together at Westall to support children’s literacy during book week 

Westall Library and Primary School have combined resources for a shared goal around literacy for children during book week.  

Collaborating around children’s literacy 

Children’s Book Week is a week that brings a lot of joy and energy to libraries and educational settings whilst spreading messages about the importance of children’s literacy. Having Westall Primary School so close to Westall Library has meant that the school and library staff were able to work closely together to develop and organise literacy activities during book week for all primary school students.  

After Our Place facilitated the connection between school and library staff, the school and library met and developed a plan to enable all primary school children to attend a story time session and activity at the library during book week.  

During these sessions, children were also introduced to the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) theme of “Dreaming with eyes open” and the books named by CBCA as the books of the year. With the assistance of student leaders, reading, writing and drawing clubs were also held each day during lunchtime within the school for all students to participate in.  

To support these great initiatives, Our Place reconnected with partner organisation 123Read2Me, who also have a strong literacy focus and facilitated the opportunity for their School Literacy Day Program to be incorporated into the book week activities. Arranging this resulted in another large book donation, and working alongside the school, a plan was put in place for the donated books to be available each day in the school reception area. Each grade was then allocated a time slot during book week to visit the reception area so each child could choose two free books to take home.  

These initiatives certainly created a buzz around the Westall site during book week, and the topics on everyone’s minds were books and reading! To end such a great and exciting week, the primary school held a book week dress-up day where students and teachers dressed up as their favourite book, movie, cartoon or comic book character. A large number of parents/carers were in attendance, and the children enjoyed showing off their costumes and acting like their favourite characters in front of a crowd.   

Aligning with the Our Place Approach 

This is one example of Our Place’s role of ‘The Glue’ and the evidenced based element of High-Quality Schooling in action. As Our Place is not a direct provider of services or programs, our expertise is in building long-term relationships and coordinating the engagement, consultation and data-informed planning that helps to drive innovation. We also focus on targeted service development and identify and facilitate new ways of working with families and the community where required. 

To learn more about the Our Place Approach, including the key features of our five evidence based elements Click Here