Your Kid’s Next Book Week Dress Up with Megan Daley (and why you should start preparing now!)

Our visions of the Book Week dress up parade don’t necessarily always translate into reality, because we’re busy, kids are busy, parents are busy…and sometimes that means dressing up is a matter of a last-minute dive into the dress up box, and a frantic on-the-day search for the corresponding book. I spoke to Megan Daley, and picked her brains about what, as a Teacher Librarian, made Book Week successful at her school, and she gave me the low-down for you, to help make this year’s Book Week a success…

How to prepare

Locate and gather as many of the shortlisted books as you can
The CBCA shortlist is out – and hopefully some of the titles are in your library. Make sure they are shared, read aloud, and talked about with your students. It’s important to contextualise Book Week and start to generate some excitement!

Read the shortlisted titles – or excerpts of them – aloud.
In class, at assemblies, during wet day timetable – any time you or other staff have a moment.

Discuss the books
Story, characters, authors, illustrators – talk about why they might have been shortlisted, what you enjoyed about them, what your favourites are

Start your own shadow judging competition
This could be registered with the official organisation, or just informal at your school – choose a category, read and discuss the books with a group of students (might be a class, a lunchtime club, a book group) – and decide who YOU think should be the winners this year. You could have a voting system with stickers, or something as simple as a show of hands after reading all the contenders in a category.

Seed ideas for costumes starting NOW!
Start with the shortlist books – talk about how you could dress for favourite characters in those, and other favourite books. Get students to brainstorm ideas in class for costumes. Encourage them to use everyday items and existing clothes (or sheets and pillowcases!) to create their own costumes, and to make a list of ideas from things they already have. Megan suggests using the homework diary, so parents can also be in on the planning.

This year’s theme is Symphony of Stories
And there are characters created by illustrator Briony Stewart which could also be inspiration for dressing up!

I decided to try and show what stepping into a symphony of stories might be like. A huge colourful collection of characters bursting out of a book representing their different stories with weird and wonderful instruments.
– Briony Stewart, in the CBCA website

Don’t just talk the talk with costumes – walk the walk!
Megan and her colleagues had a tradition to build up excitement for the book week parade: they used to dress up in costumes every day leading up to the parade, as characters from shortlisted or notable books. They made the students guess who they were dressed as each day, and it was a super exciting and much-anticipated part of the term. Students love seeing staff get involved, especially in dress ups, and modelling how a home-crafted costume could look in advance is a really tangible way to help students visualise their own costumes.

When is Book Week?
CBCA Children’s Book Week is Saturday 22 August to Friday 28 August 2026!

Let us know what your plans are to prepare in the comments, we’d love to hear about it!

UK National Year of Reading and the power of reading for pleasure

“In an increasingly noisy, complicated world, reading is our quiet superpower.”

-Richard Osman (The Guardian, 2026)

Recent Australian data has shown that around a third of Australian children cannot read proficiently, and that 29% of teens are choosing not to read for pleasure at all (Australia Reads, 2025)…and in the UK, only 1 in 3 children and young people aged 8 to 18 say they enjoy reading in their free time – and only 1 in 5 say they read something daily (National Literacy Trust, 2026).

In the UK, the Government and the National Literacy Trust have come together to help disrupt this trend by celebrating a National Year of Reading – and consequently, resources for promoting reading for pleasure have never been more up-to-date or abundant!

On this blog, we’ve brought together some current professional reading, advice and ideas, and resources, to help school library staff promote reading for pleasure in their school.

Evidence

It’s no secret that reading for pleasure is important – but how, and why? Evidence-based practice is important and these resources will give you the support to back your instincts with real data.

Tips

Many of these ideas will not be new to library professionals – but it’s always good to be refreshed and re-invigorated or reminded about great ideas to put into practice in your library.

Resources

These resources give you plenty of activities and reading lists to help you augment your arsenal of tools to help promote reading for pleasure in your school.

Feel free to add any other resources you’ve found valuable in the comments! Happy reading!

Starting off the year right: task list and resources for those new to SCIS and the school library

Are you new to the library? Or perhaps you’re experienced, but quite like a checklist?! SCIS has your back…here’s an overview of the types of tasks that need attention at the beginning of the year – and for more detail, you can download the check list, resource links and access a free webinar recording.

☑️Administrative system setup

First things first – you need to know how to work that computer. Give yourself a bit of time to familiarise yourself with the library management system – how to do loans and returns and so on – and also ensure your borrower records are up to date. Your particular library managment system will have instructions on how to do all of these things, so check on their website for more detail.

☑️Collection and catalogue

Make sure everything is orderly, documented and findable: weed old or damaged resources, process any new resources and check you know what digital subscriptions your users have access to – if any.

☑️Library space

Make sure everything is organised to your liking and that you have all the equipment and signage you may need. Think about what kinds of displays you’d like to have over the year and set up the first one to welcome users back to the library.

☑️Teaching and learning

Whether you are responsible for delivering library lessons or not, you may like to think of some orientation and engagement activities for your users to do when they come in to borrow – things like a scavenger hunt or a suggestion box for new resources can be useful for both the students and for you!

You’ll probably want to think about policies too – in practical everyday terms, things such as loan periods, and whether you charge fines for overdue items; but also, possibly, for aquisitions and challenged materials.

Lastly, checking in with teachers so you can align library purchases and support with curriculum is a great first step to making the library visible and valued by staff.

☑️Communication and advocacy

Advocating for the library is the fun part – all it is is letting people know all the great things you do every day! Send a welcome message advertising the opening hours and introducing library staff. Highlight new services and resources on school platforms like the newsletter, or at assemblies and staff meetings. Think about whether you’d benefit from the help of volunteers – and how you’d use their help – and ask the community to register their interest.

All of these things are covered systematically in the checklist document available for download below – along with a list of online resources and reading that you might wish to look at. Best of luck with the start of 2026!

Word doc – Starting your year with SCIS February 2026 checklist handout

PDF – Starting your year with SCIS February 2026 checklist handout

Connections Journal, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

Before I begin, perhaps I should introduce myself. I’m Ceinwen Jones and I’ve just begun as the Editorial & Professional Learning Lead at SCIS. This means I’m responsible for editing Connections Journal, as well as writing and curating blog posts, articles, and webinars for school library staff. Professionally, I started my working life as a primary school teacher, soon adding a library degree so that I could be a teacher librarian (clearly the best job in the school!) In between times, I worked as a music librarian at the University of Melbourne, did a bit of travelling, and raised a family. In my spare time, I’m reading, watching terrible television, parenting, volunteering; and working on my PhD about whether users and cataloguers differ in their perception of the purpose and value of school library cataloguing data.

Back to my love of Connections, though…I’ve enjoyed it over the years from a few different perspectives: Connections has always been a thread that links me back to the school library world.

As a librarian: I enjoyed the insights into the school library world, and I often came across references to it when researching. I knew I could rely on it as a trusted source of information about the school library sector.

As a teacher librarian: I loved receiving our Connections Journal in the post. It kept me up to date with things that other school library staff were up to, it gave me ideas for collection development and displays, it gave me an insight into philosophies about books, reading and information literacy…and it was the most enjoyable part of my professional reading!

As a librarian working at SCIS: I loved staying in touch with schools and libraries’ achievements, concerns, and views about literacy and information literacy. I loved reading feature articles from authors and creators; and hearing expert opinions and research from school library professionals.

As the new editor of Connections Journal: I love being able to talk with and hear directly from school library staff, and really immersing myself in that world. I love being able to share, and enable sharing, of professional knowledge about school libraries, and I love thinking about how SCIS can help make the job of school library staff a little more easy!

I’m so excited that I get to work on Connections Journal! I love the new look of it (shout out to Daniel Czech and Aja Bongiorno for their work on the graphics, layout and design!) and I’m keen to try out some new features and see if we can make Connections even more useful and relevant for school library staff in 2026 and beyond.

Happy Library Lovers’ Day!

Read Connections Issue 136 on our website today…

Start-of-year inspiration from Connections journal

Welcome to 2026! We hope everyone had a restorative break, and that you’re excited for the year ahead.

We’ve curated a collection of posts from past issues of Connections journal to inspire and spark ideas for you in the coming year. Let us know in the comments what exciting plans you have for your library in 2026!

Library collections

When thinking about your collection and how you arrange and develop it according to your school’s needs, you may like these articles to generate ideas:

Genre

A perennial topic for library staff, the idea of genrefication is a major project that many schools have undertaken. Diving deeper, particular genres may be pertinent to the learning or social needs of your users.

These two articles about experiences with genrefication may give you a taste of what the experience is like:
- - Finding the right balance with genrefication choices; and
  - Reflections on the genrefication process three and a half years later.
Have you ever thought of dystopian fiction as a form of bibliotherapy for These Unprecedented Times?! Perhaps you should!
We know that Manga is popular with students, but the range and volume of Manga available can be confusing for the novice – here’s some advice about curating your Manga collection.

Supporting literacy and information literacy

Whether you teach ‘library classes’ or support classroom teachers with literacy and information literacy, these articles will be useful for ideas and approaches.

Plagiarism is tricky to spot, now more than ever. Here’s an article with some tips about the issue from a cataloguer’s point of view.
Novel approaches to teaching and learning can help students with diverse needs engage with reading and literacy, as shown in this article.
A great online curriculum resource, it’s worth reminding your staff about Scootle, a portal to free curriculum-aligned resources for Australian educators.

We hope you find some of these articles useful in your preparation for the coming year, and do let us know what you’re excited about in your library in 2026 in the comments!

Author: ceinwen