Menu
Powered by:
The 2024 Monster Bookathon invites schools to celebrate their pupils’ engagement with stories, books and illustrations and to reap the many social and emotional benefits of reading for pleasure. If your community can do so, it is also an amazing opportunity to raise money for a great cause.
The 2024 Monster Bookathon is not a typical readathon that simply challenges children to read as much as they can within a given time (although many of your pupils will certainly choose to do this). Instead, children set themselves a personal book-related challenge and work towards this, inviting sponsorship for a goal they feel excited and curious about aiming for.
You might want to let children set their own reading challenge or prefer to set the challenge yourself. Some examples follow:
“We are participating in this year’s Monster Bookathon to…”
Or you could set a fundraising target for the Monster Challenge. Some examples follow:
“We are participating in this year’s Monster Bookathon to…”
Your Bookathon can be any length, but 10 days can work well, kicking off on a Friday and wrapping up on Monday or Tuesday after two weekends. This gives children enough time to achieve their Bookathon goals and to raise money.
Schedule the Bookathon when most children from your school or club can participate. Is holding the Bookathon during the school day or your club evening an option? Or perhaps during the school holidays or even during one lesson.
Your Bookathon won’t be successful without high participation, so communicate the details of the event to staff, children and parents ahead of time. Make sure teachers are fully informed about the initiative and know how to help each child to register their challenge. And send home information in plenty of time at least three weeks in advance to allow time for children to gather sponsorship (if applicable).
At the bottom of this page you will find posters, parent letters and other resources you can use to promote your 2024 Monster Bookathon and to generate sign ups.
If you are a parent/guardian, your child can set up their fundraising page directly here:
If you are a school/teacher, you can first set up a school campaign page, and then invite all students to set up fundraising pages affiliated with that campaign page.
Note that children will need a parent/guardian to approve their registration via email so ideally will register at home.
At the bottom of this page you will find an example Monster Bookathon challenge page so that you can show children what theirs will look like. They should use the challenge page even if they are not collecting sponsorship since it is here that they write down details of their reading adventures.
Reading sprints: Host live reading sprints e.g. at school break times where children can read together, count their minutes and share their progress.
Reading totaliser: Have a class reading challenge as well as individual reading challenges. Encourage children to shade in the class ‘totaliser’ to indicate how many minutes / books they’ve read.
Celebration board: Display artwork and illustrations created during this campaign or set aside a dedicated table in the school library.
Bookathon Challenge: Encourage participants to fulfil reading prompts, reading books that match each prompt, allowing them to explore different genres, authors, or themes. You can also transform the reading prompts into a bingo card for participants to complete. Participants can mark off the squares as they read books that fulfil the corresponding prompts.
