World Book Night 2021
The occasion of World Book Night has long been considered a highlight of the year when it comes to the English department at Gimnazija Vič. This international celebration of books and reading allows our teachers and project mentors to bring in additional elements of literature and to follow special themes in their classes. In addition, we have connected it to one of our school’s biggest creative writing projects for the best part of the last decade. We are happy to say that, despite the challenges of the past year, 2021 proved to be no exception.
In regular classes, students had the chance to explore some poetry and extracts from popular novels. Whenever possible, teachers followed the main theme of World Book Night 2021 which was “Books to make you smile”. Also, efforts were made to get more students into the habit of reading through some small book-themed creative projects which took place both in class and as part of the distance-learning programme which was such a key part of our lives during this school year.
Our creative writing competition took its traditional form in that students had to write a micro-story of a hundred words or fewer based on one of the themes selected by our organising team. For 2021, our themes were connected to the Mr Men characters of Roger Hargreaves as the reading world marked fifty years since the first of these popular children’s characters made it to print. This meant that students could choose a general theme such as Happy, Topsy-Turvy, Bump, Daydream, etc. before coming up with their own title and original story.
Despite the challenges of the year, the mentors in all of the schools involved work hard to give their students a chance to show their creativity and language skills in this way and our judging team was delighted to have over two hundred stories to read by the time the competition closed.
It was a difficult task for our judges to come up with a shortlist of stories which all made it into a special booklet and then pick the winning stories for which the writers received a special commendation and a small prize. However, they praised the winning stories for standing out through unique ideas, showing special perspectives, having excellent levels of description, and leaving the readers wanting more.
Our thanks must go to the students and mentors from the schools around Ljubljana whose hard work and dedication to the project made sure that the 2021 competition was a success.
The schools involved in the primary-level competition were:
- OŠ Brezovica pri Ljubljani
- OŠ Dobrova
- OŠ dr. Ivana Korošca Borovnica
- OŠ Kolezija
- OŠ Kolezija – lokacija Splitska
- OŠ Škofljica
- OŠ Šmartno pod Šmarno goro
From all the stories submitted at this level, eight were awarded prizes by our judging panel. They joined the ten prize winners from across all four years of Gimnazija Vič in getting these special commendations for their creativity and skill with the English language.
All of those who worked on organising the different elements of the World Book Night event at our school look forward to putting together new plans for the event in the years ahead and we very much share that enthusiasm for working with our colleagues in other local schools to plan other situations for creative work and cooperation as well.