St Julian’s Book Week and Poetry Slam uncover a lot of talent
The English Department were happy to shake off the dust from the Harry Potter cloaks that had been filed away in the book cupboard when the school closed in 2019 ready to join the Primary School for the first whole-school Book Week. The Harry Potter theme carried on into KS3 classrooms with students casting descriptive spells to ward off boggarts and using their best descriptions to make their way around Hogwarts.
Throughout the week we celebrated the importance of and pleasure in reading by encouraging students to enter competitions which included: ‘Getting Caught Reading’, ‘Extreme’ Reading Selfies and guessing the teachers’ ‘Shelfie’. Book Week ended with an opportunity to come dressed as a favourite character and author.
Book Week is a long-running initiative designed to promote a love for reading and as we come to the end of the academic year we hope that students have been prompted to use their summer holiday as an opportunity to continue to read fictional stories for pleasure and to extend their language skills.
St Julian's Poetry Slam
The grand final of the English Department’s annual Poetry Slam was held last week. Winners of class heats that had taken place across all-year groups were tasked with performing a poem of their own composition in front of a packed audience in the final. For the first time in three years, the Slam was live and in person. The student performances were interspersed with readings by courageous teaching staff who volunteered to write and read their own poems aloud - always a high point of the event and a particular shout-out must go to Mr Mount for his deeply affecting reading.
The quality of poetry and performance was high across all years and the 20 finalists all wowed judges and audience alike. The two overall winners Jinyuan Meng and Olivia Blanchard brought the house down with their work, but it was genuinely the case that all of the finalists deserved huge congratulations.
An anthology of all of this year’s finalists’ poems is available here.
Dan Davis, Head of the English and Tory Coates, English Teacher
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