Book Week at our Norlane centre: one week of shared stories

How Children’s Book Week 2026 ran in our rooms: ceilings full of hand-cut characters, a costume day nobody had to buy anything for, and families reading aloud beside their children.

Book Week has a sound of its own. A three-year-old explains her costume to a toddler who has no idea who the character is and is delighted anyway. A parent’s voice carries across the room while the children lean in for the next page. Somebody asks, for the fourth time that morning, whether we can please read the caterpillar one again.

It is one of the few weeks when every room at Montessori Minds is doing the same thing at the same time: Babies, Toddlers and Kindergarten, along with the educators, the kitchen and the office. Below is how the week ran in our Norlane rooms, and why reading takes up so much space in a Montessori programme.

If you are a Geelong family choosing where your child will spend their early years, the way a centre treats books tells you a great deal. Reading with young children is one of the simplest and most researched things adults can do with them, and it costs nothing but attention.

What Children’s Book Week is

Children’s Book Week is run each year by the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA), a not-for-profit that has championed Australian writing and illustrating for children since the 1940s. In 2026 it ran from Saturday 22 August to Friday 28 August, and the national theme was Symphony of Stories, with artwork created by award-winning author-illustrator Briony Stewart.

2026 was a milestone year: the CBCA Book of the Year Awards reached their eightieth year. The awards run across several categories, including a dedicated Early Childhood category for picture books aimed at our youngest readers. That shortlist makes a very good borrowing list for families with children under six.

Across the country, schools, libraries, kindergartens and long day care services mark the week with character dress-ups, story sessions, author and illustrator visits and classroom displays. Most services build the week around the dress-up day. We wanted the reading to carry at least as much weight as the costumes.

How the week ran at our Norlane centre

Preparation started well before Monday, and the children did most of it, which is how we prefer it. A child who helps make the display understands the display. An oversized open book went up under the foyer ceiling, hung with characters the children had cut out themselves. Paper vines and butterflies were threaded along the light rings. In the Kinder room, paper roses and hand-print leaves filled the tree on the back wall.

None of it was decoration for the sake of a photograph. Young children read an environment long before they read a word, and when the space says stories live here, they behave accordingly. They carry books over to adults. They retell plots to each other. Then they start inventing their own.

Why reading aloud matters so much in the early years

Between birth and about six, children build the language system they will use for the rest of their lives. Vocabulary, sentence structure, the rhythm of storytelling, the understanding that marks on a page carry meaning. Most of it is laid down through conversation and shared reading rather than through formal instruction.

The Australian evidence here is unusually clear. A well-known study by Kalb and van Ours, using Longitudinal Study of Australian Children data and published through the Melbourne Institute, found that parents reading to children at ages four to five was positively and significantly associated with reading and broader cognitive skills, still measurable at ages ten and eleven, after accounting for family background. Frequency mattered. So did the simple act of an adult sitting down and doing it.

What research cannot tell you is what any individual child will do, and we will never suggest otherwise. Every child develops at their own pace, and early literacy shows up in very different ways. One child narrates whole plots at three. Another is still mostly listening at four, then reads comfortably at six. Both sit within the normal range. What we can say is that daily reading aloud supports language development, builds attention and vocabulary, and strengthens the relationship between the adult and the child doing it.

How a Montessori programme supports early language

Book Week sits comfortably inside a Montessori environment because language work happens in our rooms every day, in a deliberate sequence. Maria Montessori observed that young children absorb language from the world around them long before they can produce it. That puts a real responsibility on the adults in the room: the language on offer has to be accurate, unhurried and worth absorbing.

Oral language comes first

Before letters, before writing, before any talk of reading, children need words and the confidence to use them. In our rooms that means naming real objects precisely, singing, rhyming, storytelling without a book in hand, and educators who listen, which matters most of all. A conversation where an adult waits for a two-year-old to finish a slow sentence is language teaching, even though it looks like nothing much.

Sounds before letter names

Montessori classrooms introduce letters by their sound rather than their alphabet name, usually through sandpaper letters the child traces with two fingers while saying the sound. The child hears it, sees it and feels the shape of it at the same time. This multi-sensory approach is designed to support later writing and reading, and it is offered when an individual child shows interest rather than to a whole room on a timetable.

Writing often comes before reading

One of the things that surprises visiting parents most is that Montessori children frequently build words before they read them, using a moveable alphabet: loose letters a child can push into place to spell what they are thinking. It separates the physical difficulty of handwriting from the intellectual work of composing, so a child who cannot yet hold a pencil comfortably can still write a sentence.

Mixed ages do some of the teaching for us

In our 3–6 Kindergarten community, a five-year-old reading to a three-year-old is not a staged activity. It happens on its own, several times a day. The younger child gets a model within reach of their own ability. The older child consolidates a skill by using it for a real purpose, which is far more powerful than being tested on it.

Real books, carefully placed

Our shelves sit at child height, face out where possible, holding a small rotated selection rather than an overwhelming wall. Children choose their own book and return it themselves. The prepared environment does a quiet job here: when choosing and caring for a book is easy, children do both without being asked.

All of this sits within the Early Years Learning Framework, particularly Outcome 5, children are effective communicators, and the National Quality Standard’s expectations for educational programme and practice. Our funded kindergarten programme is delivered by a teacher registered with the Victorian Institute of Teaching, and learning is documented and shared with families through Storypark, so you can see what your child is actually engaging with rather than guessing from a costume photo.

Families reading in our rooms

Inviting families in to read was the part of the week we were least able to predict, and in the end valued most.

Our community includes families from more than sixty nationalities and educators from sixteen countries, and several parents chose to read in their first language. The children listening did not need to understand every word. They watched an adult they knew treating a book as something worth their full attention, in a language that sounded like home to at least one child in the circle. For that child, seeing their language given the floor in their own classroom does something for belonging that no display board can.

This is not a nice extra. Partnership with families sits at the centre of the National Quality Standard, and the home reading environment is consistently one of the strongest influences on early literacy. A centre that reads to your child all day and never talks to you about reading has done half the job.

Costume day without the stress or the cost

Every Book Week, some families quietly dread the dress-up day. Costumes cost money, mornings are already tight, and nobody wants their child to be the one who feels out of place. Our position is simple: a costume should never be a barrier to a child joining in.

• Clothes you already own. A striped shirt, a red jumper, a pair of gumboots and a hat will cover dozens of picture-book characters.
• One item is a costume. A paper crown, cardboard ears, a drawn-on moustache. Children commit to the idea, not the production values.
• Comfort wins. Children play, eat, paint, climb and sleep here. Anything scratchy, tight, trailing on the ground or hard to remove for toileting will be abandoned by 9.30 am.
• Safety first. We ask families to avoid masks that restrict vision, long cords or ties near the neck, small detachable pieces for children under three, and face paint for children with sensitive skin or a known reaction.
• Opting out is completely fine. Some children find dress-ups genuinely unsettling. They take part in everything else and nobody comments — that is a deliberate choice on our part.
• We keep spares. If a costume is not possible at home for any reason, tell us and we will sort it out at the centre. No explanation needed.

One practical note on photographs. We take a lot of them during Book Week and share them with families through Storypark. Any image used publicly, whether on our website, in a newsletter or on social media, is only used where the family has given written consent, and consent can be withdrawn at any time. This sits alongside our wider commitments as a Child Safe Organisation.

Ten ways to keep the reading going at home

The most useful thing a centre can do after a week like this is hand something practical back to families. These are the suggestions we give most often to parents across Norlane, Corio, Bell Park, Lara and greater Geelong.

1. Attach reading to something that already happens. After the bath, before the light goes off. It sticks far better than deciding to “read more”.
2. Let them choose, even the same book. Repetition is how young children master language. The tenth reading is doing more work than the first.
3. Talk more than you read. “What do you think he’ll do?” “Have you ever felt like that?” One book with conversation around it is worth three read straight through.
4. Read in your strongest language. Strong first-language skills support later English, and your fluency is what your child is absorbing.
5. Use the library. Geelong Regional Libraries membership is free and includes board books, picture books and school-holiday story sessions.
6. Put books where children are. A low basket in the lounge room, a couple in the car, one in the nappy bag. Children read what they can reach.
7. Say the sound, not the letter name. “Mmm” rather than “em”. It matches what we do in the classroom and makes blending words easier later.
8. Tell stories without a book. Family stories, what happened at work, an invented story on the drive home. Oral storytelling builds the same muscles.
9. Let them “read” to you. A three-year-old turning pages and inventing the words is reading in every sense that matters at three.
10. Stop when they are done. Ten willing minutes beat thirty resented ones, every time.

One last reassurance. If some weeks you manage two nights out of seven, that is fine. Children are not built out of perfect routines. They are built out of ordinary, repeated, good-enough moments.

What carries on after Book Week

The decorations come down. The routines do not.

Every room continues daily story time and, more importantly, one-to-one reading whenever a child brings a book to an educator. Language materials stay on the shelves and are offered to individual children as they show readiness. Children keep making their own books: dictated, drawn, stapled and read aloud to anyone who will sit still. Our Kindergarten children keep building the skills that support a confident start at school: listening, following a sequence, expressing an idea clearly, holding a pencil, hearing the sounds in their own name.

Several of the books children fell in love with during the week have stayed in constant rotation, which is the clearest sign the week did its job. Book Week is not an event we run for a photo gallery. It is one loud week inside a quiet, continuous programme that also runs music, cooking, language, yoga and our sustainability work through the year.