Cheney Celebrates World Book Day 2026!

World Book Day at Cheney was great fun with lots of activities for everyone to take part in. Here’s a flavour of what went on:

• Drop Everything And Listen is the annual whole-school story event where teachers read consecutive excerpts of a story throughout the day at the beginning of each lesson. This year we focussed the amazing work of one author—the Oxford-based Kiran Millwood Hargrave

• The New Library Book Extravaganza is when the library team releases nearly 300 brand new library books all in one go, available in a party atmosphere in the library from 8am. Students can be seen sprinting across the school to get first dibs on the selection. We issued nearly 150 books before 8:30. 

• The Inter-house lit quiz was held during period one. Four students represented their houses in years 8 and 9 and worked together to answer fiendish questions on a variety of books. The quiz is also the qualifying round for the NLT National Lit Quiz that Cheney is entering for the first time next week. Congratulations to Helen, Edwin Miriam and Thomas from the year 8 Turing team who won the quiz after a nail biting tie-break! 

• We played Booky Bingo in the library at break time, using the titles of books rather than numbers to tick off a line and a full house - this was great fun and there was a lot of jeopardy towards the end as many students had just one square to go. The winning students won a £5 book token - congratulations to Sam and Aliza in year 7 who won. 

• Lucky Dip: Each student who borrowed a book this week was able to take a ticket out of the jar to earn house points, a golden ticket or a book voucher. 

• House points: for all the activities above, the library team issued over 12,000 house points! 

The most important part of WBD for me is to raise the profile of a love of reading and stories. It is not easy to get this message across to nearly 2000 students and staff in one day, so for me, World Book Day is every day, with one day a year to have lots of fun and to come together as a community through books and reading. 

A special mention for our wonderful student librarians for their support and huge thanks to Miss Cullen for all her hard work and inspiration, Mr Fieldwick for being an amazing compere on the day and the whole Cheney community for their support. 

Mrs Fenton, Cheney Librarian.