Now the first official performance of Kicking Goals For Readers has been performed I can publish this blog post…

It was a HUGE day for reading and football on Friday, June 19th at St Martin’s!

Excitement was bubbling to Grand Final fever pitch as our 21 classes gathered in our hall to watch the highly anticipated stage performance of Kicking Goals For Readers by footy authors Felice Arena, Michael Wagner and Adrian Beck. These popular authors whose footy books cover from P-6 are combining their many talents ‘to take the action from the page to the stage’…  

Wearing our footy colours and passionately singing along to footy team songs everyone was in the footy spirit. The hall erupted with laughter as Felice Arena emerged doing his ‘Umpire Dance’ and some rather fancy footy tricks! The scene was set for a combination of Aussie Rules football, music, multimedia, books and lots of fun.

There were so many parts of the show to enjoy, including each author performing a unique version of his footy team song. Who would have thought “Good Old Collingwood” could be sung as a folk song and be surprisingly soothing? We laughed at the video of the authors taking on 1GC’s Egg Handball Challenge and an unlucky author who ended up with egg on his face. Felice helped our very own ‘Specky Magee’ in Year 6 show us how to take a slow motion Specky while we all had fun barracking silently in slow motion. Imagine a capacity crowd barracking like this on Grand Final day at the MCG!

We also enjoyed listening to each author speak about his books and writing journey and the positive messages each imparted about writing, following your dreams and having a passion for what you do. It was also interesting to hear about the different paths that led each of them to becoming authors and great to see them collaborating with their show.

One thing for certain is that we will never look at umpires in the same way again after watching the dance moves in the hilarious “Umpire Funk” led by Felice with our very own Mr O and Mr Z. We might have to try out some “Umpire Funk” on our Footy Day in September with Mr O leading the way with his groovy freestyle dance moves. At the end of the show we noticed that the windows in our hall had actually steamed up from all of the fun and excitement!  

After using lots of energy performing, our authors happily greeted long lines of eager fans and generously spent the afternoon in our library signing books and chatting with each child. It was a delight to see the looks on children’s faces as they met Felice, Michael and Adrian. There was such a wonderful buzz at the end of the day as students rushed to tell their parents about the performance and show them their signed books! Our authors had definitely achieved their goal of Kicking Goals For Readers and ‘taking the action from the page to the stage’…  

Enjoy watching some of the highlights of Kicking Goals For Readers 

I use Twitter professionally to connect with other educators and love the opportunity it also provides to interact with authors like Felice, Michael and Adrian. When Felice asked if they could trial their show with our school before their first official performance I was surprised, excited (and a tad nervous), but in the end I was SO glad I said “Yes”!  It provided me with a wonderful opportunity to do one of the most important jobs teacher librarians do…bringing children, books and authors together.

Thank you Felice, Michael and Adrian for an amazing experience for our school and a fabulous and fun celebration of books, reading and footy!  

Footy, footy, footy!
Read, read, read!