ASL joins the nationwide celebration of reading with a wonderful World Book Day!

Thursdays at 2 pm, ASL students can generally be found doing some of everything: analyzing texts, learning to play together, solving calculus problems, building robots, diving into the pool, putting the finishing touches on art projects, coding, traversing London on field trips, running experiments, writing essays, making music… and so much more. Today, though, 2 pm saw hundreds of our students stop what they were doing: they dropped everything, and they read.

Today, children and adults all over the UK and Ireland celebrated (and practiced!) reading with the gusto it deserves. The first Thursday in March has been “World Book Day” across the British Isles for nearly three decades now, and the ASL libraries have spent the past several years ramping up our own school’s programming when it comes time for the big day.

For middle school librarian Staci Fox P ’35 ’38 (ASL 2021–present), when it comes to World Book Day, “My biggest goal is to create cross-divisional experiences for students—specifically within our ‘DEAR’ time, or ‘Drop Everything And Read.’” As a result, from 2 to 3 pm today, lower school classes were matched with middle school volunteers for an hour of dedicated reading.

This year, the lower and middle school readers gathered in the School Center, Lower School Library, and a variety of classrooms to read.

“One of my favorite things to do is read, so World Book Day is my favorite day of the year,” Carmen, Grade 3, reports from outside the Lower School Library. “It’s a whole hour of just sitting in silence, reading, which I would love to do more often.”

“In the future,” says Staci, “I have visions of DEAR in the School Center Foyer; reception; everywhere; and the idea is that adults are also doing it.”

After reading aloud to the younger lower school students—and reading silently alongside their Grade 4 peers—middle schoolers returned to their own classrooms to enjoy their own silent “DEAR” time.

“It was really cool to be able to read to littler kids—it was very fun,” says a Grade 6 student on his way back to class after reading books aloud to K2 students.

Beyond DEAR, World Book Day at ASL was celebrated with a weeklong series of reading-related activities in both the Mellon Library (which is used by ASL’s middle and high school students) and the Lower School library. 

Lower school librarian Kate London (ASL 2025–present), who joined ASL in October, gestures to windows just outside the cozy space that she and Jillian Derbyshire (ASL 2015–present) oversee, pointing out a series of brightly colored posters about books, hung up for the week, that invite students to guess facts about familiar children’s books. “We’ve also got some quizzes and puzzles planned,” Kate adds.

Near the Mellon Library’s entrance, Staci shows off everything from a six-word story challenge—students’ carefully crafted six-word dramas, all playing out next to one another on a large whiteboard easel, in the spare style made famous by Ernest Hemingway—to a “book jar” filled with pages, and encouragement for students to guess exactly how many pages, with a prize attached for the closest guesser. (Spoiler alert: The prize is a book!)

Staci also points to a small bookshelf on wheels, which is, this week, the site of a book-spine poetry competition. The trick, she explains, is for entrants to select a number of books from this one shelf, craft a poem using only the books’ titles, stacked on top of one another, and then take a photo of their work with a nearby iPad. One recent entry reads: “50 Years from Today – We Shall Not Be Moved – Look Homeward, Angel – No Matter the Wreckage – Never Let Me Go.”

World Book Day, albeit a fun and festive excuse for everybody at ASL to stop, drop, and read, is only the tip of the reading iceberg here on Waverley Place: All year long, librarians and teachers across the three divisions work hard to make reading feel effortless and fun for students. 

“The Lower School Library is all about reading for pleasure,” says Kate. “That comes with choice. Students come in, and whatever their interest or passion is; whatever they want to read about; they can do it here. It’s not about agendas from us or anybody else. Joy—the Lower School Library is about joy.”

Likewise, Staci notes that, for World Book Day, she has actively encouraged students to read things that were not assigned in their classes. “I want them to read just what they want to read, from Shakespeare to a graphic novel to a cereal box, and to see adults who love reading, whom they wouldn’t necessarily associate with it,” Staci says. “It’s not only their English teachers: Their math teachers are reading, and their PE teachers are reading, too.”

Throughout the year, Staci leads book talks for English classes across the Middle School. “In Grade 5, right now, we’re trying to expose them to all sorts of genres,” she says. “So once a month, the classes will come into the library, and we rotate genres. I’ll have a big list of, say, science fiction books, and I’ll get the kids really hyped about those books for one class, then rotate to another genre next month. With Grade 6, we introduce more tools, like NoveList Plus, which helps you find your next best read based on your favorite book, author, or genre.” 

Staci has offered students a “blind date with a book,” which she says was quite popular; she’s photocopied first pages of books, to allow students to try different sorts without judging books by their covers; she also helps run “Reading Rumble” at ASL—an annual, worldwide reading-based quiz competition, which one of ASL’s Grade 5 teams won last school year!

This year, she has also launched a family book club, in which she invites entire families—from one grade at a time—to dive into a book together. Once they’ve read it, Staci and the PCA’s Friends of the Libraries committee gather those families for an on-theme, decked-out evening of snacking, activities, and discussion in the Mellon Library.

As Lower School students head home today, they will each bring with them a World Book Day token, which will allow them to redeem one free book at a participating local bookstore this month. “Every child in London gets a free book for World Book Day,” Kate says. “This is a nice way to connect with the place we live, and the context we live in.”

Amig, another Grade 3 student, sums the day up perfectly: “World Book Day is where you celebrate what you enjoy about reading, and spend less time on screens: You just focus on reading. That’s what I love about it.”