Over the past week or so we've been celebrating poetry here at Queen's.  This coming Friday 24th August is National Poetry Day so it seemed like perfect timing to write and read poems and verse novels.  There is a display in the Info Centre featuring a selection from our poetry collection for you to enjoy or you can see the full list by choosing Poetry or Verse Novels under English in the visual search option of the WebOPAC.  (We have some great verse novels, by the way!)

A group of Year 10 students were lucky enough to take part in a celestial poetry evening last Thursday hosted by our English Department, as part of their Hidden Figures cross curricular study.  The evening featured poetry readings, inspiration from the night sky, fairy lights, stars of every shape and colour you can imagine, creative poetry writing activities, pizza, hot chocolate and marshmallows toasted over open fires!  The whole event was a delight from start to finish and the poetry that was crafted was of a very high standard - and adorned with stars, of course!  A very BIG thank you to the English Department for a truly amazing evening.

And if writing poetry is your thing, why not head along to the Writing Group on a Wednesday lunch time.  They are running some poetry activities this week for National Poetry Day and meet each week to share their writing and ideas.  (See Mrs Montgomerie for more details if you're interested)

On Friday we celebrated the conclusion of our Reading Challenge and Book Lovers' Week.  Congratulations to all our prize winners!  All our activities and competitions were very well supported and lots of fun was had in the process.  A big thank you to Mrs Hanning for the delicious, cute cupcakes, to Mrs Montgomerie for judging the exceptionally high standard of poems in the Book Spine Poetry competition and to Mrs Smith for helping with the prize draws.  And an especially big thank you to all the students and staff who took part in some way.  Our Reading Challenge this year saw us reading a total of over 450 books across the school - a magnificent effort!  It is going to be very hard to top this year's successes in 2019, but we're up for the challenge.

Congratulations to our Book Spine Poetry winners:

1st place - Abby and Eleanor (11SPE)
2nd place - Bridget (9CLA)
3rd place - Ella, Dani and Lydia (9CLA)
Comic poet's award - Amberley (10CIV)
Effective Last Line award - Juliette (12ROB)

And congratulations to our lucky Reading Challenge winners who took home a $20 gift card from Paper Plus:
Jenna, Zena, Jaizelee, Ruby C, Holly C, and Mrs Smith (staff prize winner)

The junior form class with the most books read during the Challenge was 10CIV and the senior form class (by only 1 book!) was 11SPE - enjoy your special chocolate cake morning teas :)

The winning house was Rae with 605 points - well done!

There has been an awful lot of reading going on since our challenge began back in June.

Our goal was to read 250 books across the school and we have exceeded that total with another 2 and a bit weeks to go!  Keep up the good work - it looks like we'll be setting a much higher target for our Reading Challenge next year to keep us motivated to read even more.

Here are the results as of today:
(For more up to date progress, check out the posters in the Info Centre entrance)

Leading junior form class - 9CLA
Leading senior form class - 11LWR and 13DOD

House points competition:
Ballard - 280 points
Dawson - 230 points
Pickering - 375 points
Rae - 365 points

And don't forget that every entry goes in the draw to win one of 5 $20 gift cards from Paper Plus, so keep those entries coming in!  Winners will be drawn in the Info Centre on Friday 10th August at the conclusion of Book Lovers' Week.

The latest installments in 3 popular series are here!  These books are on the New Book Display in the Info Centre this week.  Don't miss out - place a reserve to guarantee your spot in the queue!

Next time you're in the Info Centre looking for a good book, check out the ones in our new display.  We can guarantee that these are great reads!

Go Girl by Barbara Else is being launched at a special event on Sunday 13th May.  This fantastic book contains biographies of loads of inspiring and amazing New Zealand women - grab a ticket and get along to hear the author and illustrator talk about girls, goals and being amazing.

And if you'd like to take a look at the book itself, we have a copy in the Information Centre.