National Share a Story Month Competitions and Resources
Community Reading Event Competition
We were delighted to see so many groups and young children engage with National Share-a-Story Month 2025 and are thrilled to announce the winners of the competitions.
Community competition winners
Thanks to the generosity of the children’s publishing and bookselling community, we have been able to send boxes of books to two primary schools for their wholehearted responses to our community competitions. We would love to think that our readers might use them as inspiration for their own story-sharing events in the future.
A Summer Booknic
Springfield Junior School hosted their first-ever booknic. School families were invited to sign up and bring siblings along. In total, there were 32 families and over 90 attendees who came after school to read in the school grounds.The junior librarians had helped to plan the event and tidy up afterwards and about their performance of the poem, “One Broken Planet.”
Best of all, the school are already planning another reading event for the autumn.
Book swap and story telling
Tudor Grange Primary Academy Yew Tree had organised a day of storytelling and book swapping. The plan was to stage the event outside in the newly refurbished garden area, but cold winds and overcast skies meant relocating to the school library and adjoining room.
Children from Nursery to Year Six exchanged up to two books for gold coins and then settled down in the library for stories based around environmental themes.
We loved hearing how inclusive the day was. Children that hadn’t brought anything to swap could still take part by taking ex-library stock, so all the children went home with at least one book new to them. There were also book plates provided so that children could dedicate a book to a younger sibling or friend.
Organising a community reading event
If you have never organised a community reading event before, check this NSSM event checklist for useful advice and checklists from Louisa Farrow, National Share-a-Story Month Coordinator.
Booklist
2025 was ‘Changing the World, One Book at a Time’, and we chose to interpret this from an environmental perspective.
Thinking about environmental damage can be a gloomy subject. We wanted to make sure that we were offering a hopeful narrative that stressed positive changes as well as how to mitigate harm.
We wanted to include a variety of genres, including graphic novels and poetry as well as picture books and novels of different lengths, different complexity and that demand different levels of emotional maturity, acknowledging that children have different reading preferences.
It was important to us to find inclusive titles that reflected the diversity of many of our communities because we believe that all children need to see themselves in books. The CLPE Reflecting Realities reports are proof that this isn’t yet as easy as we might think, but we have done our best.
Most of all, we wanted to showcase the very best stories we could find.
The booklist can be downloaded below.