Derby Grammar School’s Junior pupils have thrown themselves wholeheartedly in to celebrating World Book Day by writing their own short stories and dressing up as their favourite story character.

A firm favourite in the school calendar, the boys always look forward to World Book Day. This year the celebrations, led by Year 3 teacher Mrs Monk, have included a short story competition.

Each boy submitted their entry of between 100 and 500 words to Mrs Monk. Congratulations to Ben Blakeman (Year 3), Denny Allsopp-Karamalikis (Year 4), Iósaif Dickens (Year 5) and Danny Bunt (Year 6) who penned the winning stories. The entries were so strong Mrs Monk also awarded runner up and highly commended prizes too. But the outstanding overall winner prize goes to Krishan Vasdev in Year 6 with his story Wineux's Demise.

Iósaif said: “I go the idea for my story by using one of the assessment openers we’d learnt about in English. I was surprised to win and really pleased. I’ve won a £5 book voucher and I’ve chosen a book called The Trials of Apollo as I enjoy stories about gods and myths.”

Krishan said: “I’ve never written detective stories before so I thought it would be good to try something different.

Writing is one of my favourite hobbies. I found it hard to condense my story to 500 words so I was surprised to be named overall winner.”

And what a fantastic array of costumes we saw, from teachers as well as pupils. Everyone gathered in the Quad for the judging which was conducted by the School Council. After a lot of deliberating the winners for each year group were announced.

David Walliams characters were as popular as ever. The Year 6 winner was Elliot dressed as Bad Dad and Year 5 winner was Alex dressed as Ratburger. The Year 4 competition was won by Srujan dressed as Mr Stink, and Year 3 by Lukesh dressed as the Transformer, Bumblebee, complete with voice changer. Mrs Genders won the staff competition as Cruella Deville.

Lukesh said: “I woke up early this morning as I was excited to get my costume on. I was really pleased to win.”

Mrs Monk, who arranged the celebrations, said: “I really enjoy World Book Day. It brings stories to life for the boys as they dress up as their favourite character, and often act like that character all day too!

I’ve had so many entries for the story competition. It’s a real pleasure to read their stories, they are so creative and imaginative. I was blown away by how many talented writers we have in the Junior School.

We encourage and nurture a love of reading and writing across the school and the boys enjoy using our Fiction Library and completing short projects as part of their reading record. Some of their achievements are quite phenomenal.”

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