World Book Day comes to Vandyke!

Yesterday was World Book Day – but Vandyke decided to extend the celebrations across the whole week!  World Book Day takes place every year, and aims to inspire children and young people to enjoy the life-changing benefits of reading for fun.

World Book Day 2026 at Vandyke has been all about reading your own way. Ms Sheppard-Davis and Ms Bolden delivered assemblies on how reading can open up worlds and help students avoid the echo chambers of social media to expand their horizons. As part of the interactive assemblies, students participated in a memory game to reiterate the science behind attaching facts to stories and were presented with the challenge of reading for 10 minutes a day. At a reading rate of 200 words per minute, just 10 minutes of reading a day means students would access 14,000 words – around half of a novel – in just a week!

World Book Day activities continued across year groups with a one-off, reading-focused lesson for Year 9, various posts and polls on the Vandyke English Instagram account, and a reading raffle, in which pupils seen reading recreationally were entered into a prize draw. On Thursday 5th and Friday 6th March, the library had a taster ‘cafe’, in which students could sample extracts of texts, and a blind book stall to encourage students to look beyond covers.

To top off the World Book Day celebrations, sixth formers and staff dressed up on Friday 6th March as their favourite book characters…