Each week our ELC girls continue to engage in rich, ongoing learning projects and immerse themselves in play experiences with friends. However, we also like to take inspiration for our curriculum from special, celebrated weeks, and Book Week is one such week that is incredibly important to us.

The Book Week Parade is a highly anticipated event for all involved and this year was no exception. We would like to say a very big thankyou to our parents for your excellent efforts in preparing the costumes. Book characters certainly came alive in our centre and provoked fantastic dramatic play while also challenging the children’s identities throughout the day.

Interestingly, Millikan and Giamminuti (2003) observed that ‘in the process of dressing-up and changing their appearance the children appear to become somebody else. The children speak differently, use different language, walk differently, as if experimenting with the reality of others’.

Millikan and Giammuniti (2014) explain this to be similar to the way an adult’s behaviour changes when dressing for different occasions, such as the gym, a wedding, ball, important meeting and so on. So, dressing up in general and especially for the Book Week Parade, really is so much more than the parade itself. The children are delving into different characters, exploring identities and expanding their worlds.

Each day during Book Week in the Mamie House, the girls were inspired to become authors and illustrators by writing and illustrating a whole book together. Firstly, the girls would enjoy a story and then take inspiration from the book to each create their very own page and contribute to a new class book. Through this, the girls learnt how to structure texts, to take care with illustrating, draw on their imaginations to create something new, and most importantly, they identified as authors and illustrators, which at three and four years of age bodes very well for their future as readers and writers.

Our Mamie girls also paid a special visit to the Year 9 science class during Book Week. The girls learnt how to plant to plant Spyridium seeds in pots they have decorated. The seeds are part of the School’s Custodians of Crawford project, which aims to save the Spyridium plant from extinction.

In the Annie House the girls’ passion for stories was ignited as the teachers all shared their favourite stories with the girls. Over the week, the girls continued to build on their Books of Sustainability with their Year 6 buddies and write letters to Earth with messages of ways that they will continue to care for our environment. The Annie girls also continued to build on their interest in space by learning about how we can care for our Earth by viewing it from space.

It is our intention in Book Week and every day, to build on and complement each little girl’s home language and literacy experiences and to inspire of love of literacy. It is from this, that a firm foundation can be laid for future development.