Nicolas Library

In 2022, a new co-curricular offering, Coffee and Culture, allowed students from Years 10 to 12, who are interested in contemporary issues, books, films, and theatre to gather, discuss ideas, and build connections and friendships based on intellectual interests in the Nicholas Library. The weekly Book Club for students in Years 7 to 9 offered books as well as audiobooks and podcasts to offer timepoor students the opportunity to hear great stories. This year the Nicholas Library launched the Game of Loans for Years 7 & 8: a class-based reading competition fostering a love of reading traditional novels, non-fiction as well as audiobooks. Book Week is the highlight of the Nicholas Library calendar. It is a week where we collectively share our love of reading, storytelling, and the many benefits that books bring to our lives. This year’s activities commenced with the girls decorating the Nicholas Library windows with their best-loved book titles, sparking conversations about shared book loves and many ideas for new reads.

Throughout Book Week the girls participated in a range of literary themed activities and competitions. Many girls participated in the spine poetry competition and produced some wonderfully creative short poems using only the words on book spines from our Library collection. The literary themed escape room proved to be extremely popular, with all sessions booked out before the end of the week. This was designed to challenge students’ problem-solving skills, lateral thinking, deductive reasoning, and decoding skills as well as their literary knowledge. Teams of three worked their way through coded messages, riddles, hidden clues, and calculations to escape the room in 15 minutes or less. Congratulations to the four teams who cracked the final code within the time limit.

For the Book Week finale, we were honoured to have St Catherine’s Old Girl, Katie Jones (Bartley ’00), speak to our Year 7 Cohort about her first book Storybook House.

Head of Nicholas Library