Book Week Parade Guide: Dates, Costumes and Running the Day

When Book Week is, and who decides

CBCA Book Week runs for a week in August, Saturday to Friday, and the dates and the theme are set each year by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The theme is announced well ahead and the shortlisted books come out in the autumn before, which is why teachers who plan early have the pick of the library copies and everyone else is on a waiting list.

Do not build a parade around a guessed theme. Check cbca.org.au, take the theme from there, and then plan.

The costume problem, solved without a shop

Every Book Week produces the same two problems: parents who find out on the Wednesday night, and children who want a character that does not exist as a costume. Both have the same answer — a costume is a signal, not a replica.

Things that work with what is already in the house:

• One strong prop beats a whole outfit. A red-and-white striped beanie, a pair of round glasses, a single yellow raincoat. Children recognise characters from one element.
• A sign around the neck. Genuinely: a well-made card saying who you are turns ordinary clothes into a character and works for books that have no visual convention at all.
• A box. Cardboard costumes photograph better than shop ones and children are prouder of them.
• Own clothes plus a book. Carrying the actual book is the most on-theme thing a child can do and nobody ever thinks of it.
• Group costumes for siblings save a parent two problems in one night.

What to avoid is the same list every year: costumes that are somebody's culture rather than a character, anything that obscures the face for a whole morning, and anything that cannot survive a playground. The last one is not a rule, it is experience.

Running the parade

A Book Week parade is four hundred excited children, a PA that does not reach the back, and a hundred parents with phones. The things that make it work are unglamorous:

• Marshal by year level with signs, not with voices. A teacher calling out a year level across an oval loses. A corflute sign held at the assembly point does not.
• Work out the loop before the day. Start point, path, stage or pause point, finish. Walk it once.
• Name the pause point. One place where each class stops for three seconds so the parents get a clean photograph. Without it you get a scrum at whichever corner the first parent picked.
• Give the announcer the list in order, with the character names phonetically if they are from books the announcer has not read.
• Have a wet-weather plan in writing, decided the afternoon before, not at 8:40 on the morning.
• Put a photo backdrop somewhere off the loop. Classes visit it before or after rather than during, and the school ends up with usable pictures instead of the back of somebody's head.

The week around the parade

The parade gets the attention; the week does the work.

• The book fair, which needs pricing signage, an entrance sign and opening hours on the door more than it needs anything else.
• A reading challenge, with a visible tracker. A wall chart that fills up beats an app nobody opens.
• Shortlist displays in the library, one shelf per category.
• Guest readers — parents, the principal, the local librarian, a firefighter. The novelty is the point.
• Buddy reading across year levels, which is easy to justify in Book Week and hard the rest of the year.

The signage

A Book Week week needs: an entry sign, marshalling signs by year level for the parade, book fair signage with hours and payment methods, library directional signs, and something to photograph against.

We print Book Week signs, parade signs and banners as ready-made designs you edit in the browser — your school name, the year, the theme wording. The corflute signs are waterproof, which is the reason schools use them outdoors in August, and the marshalling set is the one teachers say saves the most time on the day.

Printed in our Melbourne factory and dispatched within 24 hours of proof approval, which is worth knowing in the week everyone remembers Book Week at once.

Other school dates

Schools that order Book Week signage usually need the same kit again for athletics and swimming carnivals — marshalling, event and finish-line signs are the same product with different wording — and for Harmony Week in March. The full list is on the awareness day signs page.