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World Book Day - 2017


Athena

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Yesterday (the 2nd of March) it was World Book Day.

 

While the Netherlands doesn't really participate in this as we have our own 'book weeks', I coincidentally found myself reading a lot yesterday. I read 5 children's books (they were pretty short and had a big font, they were quite enjoyable) by Paul van Loon (a Dutch author).

 

Did you do anything special for or because of World Book Day?

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My kids are older now so don't dress up for World Book Day any more but their secondary school holds a 'drop everything and read' day every year, so they have to have a book in their bags and teachers can at any time say drop everything and read. My older two just read text books as they are studying for exams but Robbie took in the latest Diary of a Wimpy kid book.

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It seems that it's becoming more for children that adults in the UK.  I didn't see much stuff around for adults reading or books, but lots of children's events with lots of primary schools holding fancy dress days and other events.  I didn't do anything myself, although I did start a new book and as it was good and reading went really well at lunchtime, I decided to finish it off in the evening, so I read a whole book in a day. :)

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I think the adults' day is in April (might be on Shakespeare's birth/death day if I'm correct).  Saw a few kids dressed up, and a few dogs too (on the web!) so they try to make quite a big thing of it here, rightly so.

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I don't think Finland has any idea of this day... We did have our own Laina's day in February (Laina being a Finnish woman's name, but also meaning 'loan' in Finnish), which entails bookish activities at libraries and stuff. 

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It's very confusing as we have a World Book Day in March and then World Book Night in April. :dunno:  We also have Books Are My Bag Day celebrating bookshops in October and Independent Bookshop Week in June/July.  

 

Don't get me wrong, any opportunity to put books front and centre is good for me, but I'm not sure how we're supposed to remember them all! :roll:

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In the Netherlands we have book week (in March; books for adults; 10 days; Boekenweek), children's book week (in September / October; 10 days; Kinderboekenweek), month of the suspenseful book (month of June; thrillers and mysteries and such; Maand van het Spannende Boek) and poetry week (end of January; 7 days; Poëzieweek). I'm unaware of anything else though there could be something else. During each of these weeks, if you spent a certain amount of money (€12,50) on the respective thing (so a book for adults, a children's book, a thiller or mystery, and poetry), you get a specially written little book for free (so for book week, it's a novella for adults, for children's book week it's a children's book, for thrillermonth it's a novella that's suspenseful and for poetryweek it's a poetry collection). Each of these events have a different theme every year and every year a different author gets asked to write the free book / novella for that event.

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I think the adults' day is in April (might be on Shakespeare's birth/death day if I'm correct).  Saw a few kids dressed up, and a few dogs too (on the web!) so they try to make quite a big thing of it here, rightly so.

World Book Night is 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday), but this is the first year since they started doing it that they've not chosen "givers" to hand out books - they've changed what they're doing (which is a shame because I LOVED being a giver!).

 

World Book Day seems to have just turned into another moneymaking "holiday" for retailers of kids' costumes, and I'm always sad to see that most kids just dress up as superheroes. Now, I know superheroes are from comic books, but when they started doing the whole dress up as your favourite book character thing in schools, it was supposed to focus on "proper" books - don't get me wrong, I am a fan of comics - totally nerdy, in fact (I LOVE graphic novels!) - but I wish it would go back to being proper book characters instead of a bunch of Disney princesses (I know most of those came from fairy stories and those ones are fair play, but Elsa and Anna are NOT from a book - they're from a film which then had books made to cash in on the popularity - you get where I'm going with this, I'm sure!).

 

That said, my eldest went in dressed as Po Dameron from the most recent Star Wars film (there are loads of Star Wars book, I know, but I have no idea if Po is in any of them, as I've never read them!). He was originally going to go as Ron Weaseley, but I couldn't find my hair chalks on the morning of World Book Day, so we had a quick change of plans. My youngest went as one of Tiger Lily's tribe from Peter Pan.

 

post-3572-0-59749800-1488754150_thumb.jpgpost-3572-0-92669500-1488754154_thumb.jpg

 

This was Josh's first year of dressing up for WBD, but Xan has done it for a few years now, In the past he's gone as:

Harry Potter

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Quint (from The Edge Chronicles)

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Charlie Bucket

post-3572-0-09954200-1488754288_thumb.jpgpost-3572-0-36868400-1488754294_thumb.jpg

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My Niece's children had to dress up as their favourite book character for school.  She has four boys so there was some fighting as to who dressed up as what character.  She said it was a nightmare and was glad when the day was over.  Would have been much happier them taking their favourite book in with them.

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Would have been much happier them taking their favourite book in with them.

I would much rather they just took their favourite book to school to tell their friends about it and get others interested that way. That would be much more book-focused than dressing up as superheroes and Disney princesses. Giving each child a few minutes to tell the rest of the kids in the class about their favourite book is a surefire way to get them interested, whereas dressing up is just yet another day to stress out parents about getting a costume ready.

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I would much rather they just took their favourite book to school to tell their friends about it and get others interested that way.

That would be much better!

 

When I was in primary school, I had to give a book talk / presentation about a favourite book. All the children that year had to do that (I think I might've been 10 or 11 or such but I'm not sure.)

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I would much rather they just took their favourite book to school to tell their friends about it and get others interested that way. That would be much more book-focused than dressing up as superheroes and Disney princesses. Giving each child a few minutes to tell the rest of the kids in the class about their favourite book is a surefire way to get them interested, whereas dressing up is just yet another day to stress out parents about getting a costume ready.

 

I think that's an excellent idea, and for the reasons you mentioned.

 

We have a similar day here, but I'm not sure when it is. I only know because my ex is a teacher and he went as a hobbit one year. :) I can't remember if we did Book Week at school, but I do remember dressing up as the Little Match Girl once, so I guess it would have been for that.

 

As for World Book Day, I never remember the day in time...I usually find out on Facebook from various US/European people/pages, and by that time the day is already over here. :( 

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