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Book Week in the Nicholas Library

Book Week in the Nicholas Library

2 September 2022

Book Week is the highlight of the Nicholas Library calendar. It is a Week where we collectively share our love of reading, storytelling, and the many benefits that books bring to our lives.

This year’s activities commenced with the girls decorating the Nicholas Library windows with their best-loved book titles, sparking conversations about shared book loves and many ideas for new reads.

Throughout Book Week the girls participated in a range of literary themed activities and competitions. Many girls participated in the spine poetry competition and produced some wonderfully creative short poems using only the words on book spines from our Library collection.

The literary themed escape room proved to be extremely popular, with all sessions booked out before the end of the week. This was designed to challenge students’ problem-solving skills, lateral thinking, deductive reasoning, and decoding skills as well as their literary knowledge. Teams of three worked their way through coded messages, riddles, hidden clues, and calculations to escape the room in 15 minutes or less. Congratulations to the four teams who cracked the final code within the time limit.

For the Book Week finale, we were honoured to have St Catherine’s Old Girl, Katie Jones (Bartley ‘00), speak to our Year 7 Cohort about her first book Storybook House.

Katie reflected on her experiences of writing and the need to allow time and space for creative thinking. She emphasised that in a world where sources of stimulus are available constantly on our phones, iPads, laptops, and other devices, we need to be bored and simply ‘be.’

Katie also explained to be a good writer you need to review and edit your work multiple times and draw inspiration from a range of sources – reading the work of other authors widely. Importantly, she encouraged students not to fear feedback, inspiring them to be bold and resilient in their own creative work.