Book in a Day – Second Place Success

Book in a Day provides our budding authors and illustrators with an opportunity to work as a team to produce a book in a day. Students experience three different excursions as a part of the competition. The first allows them to get insider information on the life and process of an author or illustrator through a range of workshops and talks. They work through scenarios and look at methods that the professionals use to generate a story and see it through to completion.

The second day is the main part of the competition — the writing day. Students are given a series of prompts that need to appear in their story. These include a primary character, secondary character, setting and issue. They also get five random words that they need to have in their story. Students utilised the first part of the day to storyboard and plot the entire story. This needs to be accurate and clear, as when they break off into the writing section they are all picking up from different chapters in the hope that it will be a cohesive story when they combine them. They need to edit and revise as they go and make sure they continuously touch base with each other to check it is making sense and they are still on the same page. The book must be completed, including all illustrations, and submitted by 5:00pm on the same day.

Judging takes place over the course of a couple of months when books are sent at random to schools and judged by the target audience (Years 7 and 8 students). When all votes have been received, the top four books are sent to Scholastic for official judging to take place.

The presentation awards for Book in a Day were held on Tuesday 16 October. This was the third and final aspect. The team was able to gather with the 15 other schools that participated to celebrate their efforts and hear a range of accolades. We were awarded the Best Front Cover.

The time then came to hear the winners. Casey Grammar came second, which is an amazing achievement that we are all so proud of, especially when our team consisted of all Years 7 and 8 and other schools had students up to Year 10. I would like to thank the team for all their efforts on every excursion but also in the lead up to get themselves ready, to work as a team and produce a phenomenal story. The book they wrote is in the library for students to read, along with past books written by other teams.

Congratulations to our competitors:

Ayaana A

Darrell B

Ameek B

Harleen K

Sienna P

Gurveen S

Isabella S

Diana Thompson 

Head of Joan Reid Resource Centre