This year Bethany School has taken part in Page Turners, a locally organised book awards for schools. Our (sadly) small and exclusive group of readers read a variety of titles and voted on their favourites as well as creating a variety of creative and written responses to the books.

 Unfortunately, as the awards evening clashed with our rescheduled whole school production, only 4 of our group Oliver Finnamore, Sophie Finnamore, Ayomide Joshua Komolafe and Eriife Olatunji were able to attend the awards at Kent College, Pembury.  We wished Lydia Veal and Mia Lawley all the best for production and look forward to them being with us next year.

 Whilst we didn’t win any awards for our creative responses or reviews this year, we have seen what the competition have to offer and are more than ready to take them on next year: Mrs Shapland is pretty confident we can ace the ‘Trailers for a film version of the book’ category next year and is very keen on the idea that a Bethany pupil or two might like to come up with a book themed cake as there were a lot of scrummy looking entries about!

We thoroughly enjoyed the talk, via Zoom, from Polly Ho- Yen, writer of The Boy in The Tower, and a live and hilarious presentation and Q&A session from Sarah Crossan, writer of verse novel Toffee…. and of course we made the most of the book stall and spending our complimentary £5 vouchers, and the yummy pizza and chocolate brownie, provided by our hosts Kent College, Pembury.

The Boy in the Tower, swept the board for awards and was the overall winner of the title ‘Best Read’.

A huge thanks to Mrs Rendell our librarian, who has run the book group this year and should have been leading the way at the event but couldn’t make it. We missed you! We hope that more pupils will be keen to join us for next year’s Page Turners group… in the meantime we heartily recommend the following titles from this year’s list: