Top life changing books
22 March 2025
Top Books That Changed My Life If there is anything we know for sure at AQUILA HQ, it’s that books
Hooray! World Book Day is 30 years old. Being held on Thursday 6 March 2025, the event is funded by UNESCO as a charity to encourage young people and adults to read more and enjoy reading. Dressing up as a favourite character from a book has always been popular on the day, but here are ten additional ways to enjoy this worldwide day of celebrating books!
Carry out a survey among your friends and family to find the following: Ask for a selection of the Top Five Books, the Top Five Authors, the Top Five Illustrators, the Top Five characters and even the Top Five favourite lines (only one sentence allowed!) Compare the results. Are there any that appear in everyone’s lists?
Use the event as an opportunity to raise money for a good reading-related cause. Maybe the school library needs some extra money to replenish or update the shelves or perhaps the children’s ward of the local hospital would like some new books. Participants can choose to read what they want from comics to classics – anything goes. Focus on pages, chapters or books read for a set duration. Could you achieve a 12-hour stretch, reading in relays? Make sure it’s a comfortable timeframe to suit most readers!
Make comparisons about story books and information books on the same theme. Authors have to use ‘fact’ sources when they are researching a story whether it’s historical, geographical or ecological etc, so that they contain the correct information. Take two of Dick King Smith’s books, for example. Pair up his story The Hodgeheg with a factual book about hedgehogs and other woodland animals, or The Sheep-Pig with information sources on farming. Dick King Smith was actually a farmer before he became a teacher and author, so he already had a head start!
Well, this time it’s a pet book you must try to match up with your teacher. Ask someone to take a close-up photograph of a teacher but they should obscure their face by placing an open book in front of it showing the front and back cover of a favourite story book that they like to read to class members. Some might have examples that they have used many times with different classes over the years. How good are you at matching them? How well do you really know them and their reading choices?
All you need is a square or rectangular piece of card that has been divided up into squares, say 4 x 4 or 5 x 3. Each time the theme in each square has been completed it should be crossed off until every task has been done. Bingo! Cards could list a range of themes e.g. non-fiction book, favourite story, classic book, short story. It could be time related e.g. read at bedtime, read on a Saturday, read before breakfast or author-based e.g. C.S. Lewis, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Morpurgo, Terry Deary.
Erecting a tent in the corner of a bedroom at home or a classroom in school may seem a little strange but the set-up makes a tremendous reading den. You could make your own ‘tent’ easily with a sheet over the backs of two chairs. Add blankets and cushions for comfort and warmth. Make it somewhere which is private and quiet where you can unwind and dive into a book. Mood lighting or reading in torchlight can be fun but make sure the print stands out clearly.
There is an old Chinese proverb which says that a picture is worth a thousand words. Would you agree? Book illustrations not only provide visual appeal they should also help the reader to understand the text better. Visual information is taken in by the brain more quickly and held in the memory for longer. Often an illustration can help to explain something that is difficult to explain in the text. Study illustrations in books and itemise how much detail they contain. Look at an illustration for two minutes, cover it and then see how much information can be recalled. Choose a favourite book and re-design its front cover opting for a different theme.
Literacy may form a major plank of any curriculum, but it can also link up well with other subject areas on Word Book Day. Try tricky experiments to rival George’s Marvellous Medicine in science, find out more about the past in ‘Horrible Histories’, attempt some food technology to accompany The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hidden Figures is about four female mathematicians who worked for NASA so you could read Earth Heroes. That’s not to mention music. Select a passage from a well-known book and then choose a suitable piece of music, modern or classical, that expresses the essence of the narrative.
Instead of dressing up in character see how effective you can be at the game called charades, you will have to mime actions which will spell out the name of a well-known fiction book or a character from a story book. Those watching you perform should be told how many words there are in the title or the name and perhaps what type of story it is, but apart from that there should be no talking involved. You will need to go for distinctive features of the book or person and if one set of mimed clues don’t seem to be working switch quickly to another approach. Who can guess the solution in the quickest time?
Often our favourite books are turned into films. Sometimes the film is exactly what we imagined or other times it misses or changes some details. This might involve a little ‘homework’ but try to make comparisons between your favourite books and their film versions. You could use a Venn diagram with overlapping circles. In the intersection will go items that are common to both the book and film. Books/films to try might include ‘The BFG’, ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘The Borrowers’. Reading the book will mean you have to use your own imagination while the film will have the benefit of using such features as CGI (computer generated imagery). Extend this activity to make comparisons between reading a story and listening to it in audio book form. Some maintain that we retain detail better when reading and that with a book it is easier to refer back to refresh detail. Would you agree? Is an audio book much more convenient?
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Words: John Davis Illustration: Kevin Ward
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