World Book Day 2021 - The Mark Makers

This year’s World Book Day in lockdown will be a bit different. However, there are lots of ways to celebrate World Book Day at home, at school, or wherever you are.

Spending just 10 minutes a day reading with your children can make a huge difference to their lives.

The Mark Makers™ Story Books are perfect way to get children excited about books, with these fun characters!

In these books, join each character for an adventure to Number Town, Shape City, and Letter Land to find their missing marks! Then help them to return home safely. Children will learn to identify different marks, letters, numbers and more throughout these books.

Choose from our award winning storybooks:

           

What is Mark Making?

When a child starts to make scribbles, patterns and different shapes, this is ‘mark making’. It is their very first step towards writing. A child explores, experiments and expresses themselves through the marks they make. They begin to assign meaning to their marks which sparks creativity and exploration.
Children can mark make in many different ways: pen and paper, painting, ‘messy play’ or drawing in the sand on the beach. All of these methods provide opportunities for children to explore a wide range of tools too, such as paint brushes, chalks, pencils and their bodies.
The benefits of mark making are huge. A child’s fine motor skills will develop and strengthen in preparation for writing. Beginning to work on their gross motor skills is the stepping stone to their fine motor control and core muscle strength.
Daily activities such as throwing and catching a ball, squeezing play dough, climbing, building bricks and threading should be encouraged and facilitated as much as possible.
‘Children will, therefore, be making marks for a wide range of reasons, each equally valid. Through their marks, they are communicating their ideas, expressing their feelings, developing their imagination and creativity, and testing their hypotheses about the world. These opportunities for making ‘thinking visible’ are fundamental to children’s learning and development and should be the entitlement of every child.’
‘Mark Making Matters, Department for Children, Schools and Families’
It is our view that the more children have fun, mark making and developing their motor skills, the more prepared and confident they will be when it comes to writing at school.

About the Author

Rachel Fay lives in Gateshead with partner Andy and son, Oliver. She is a qualified primary teacher specialising in early years; taught reception where early writing was a particular passion of hers.
During maternity leave, she devised a fun pre-writing programme and ‘The Mark Makers’ were born. When returning to work she introduced this into her teaching and the results were amazing.
She then developed a mark making pre-school class called Little Learners where children can learn how to make their marks through play.