Aww the survey seems to be closed, never mind.
We love World Book Day in our house, my daughter says this time of year is her real Christmas. She's a real bookworm, sorry, book traveller, i've been told off for getting that wrong before. We all dress up for the day as our favourite book characters, we've had to get quite inventive over the years as we prefer to be loyal to the book not necessarily the film it was later adapted in to (looking at you Harry Potter fans), although sometimes that can be quite hard but the process is fun. It's meant to be fun and engaging!
I don't really understand people that don't enjoy the day, or encourage their children to take part in the day. At the school gates i've seen many the parent/ child that just stuck on an Elsa costume and was done with it. We can't abide that, not in a horrible way, each to their own and everything but books are our thing and if it were us we'd give it our all! The kid is a big book fan, she loves authors and we support those people as best we can, they're a big part of our lives. In later years DD has gone for costumes of less well known characters- characters that she feels an affinity to and i like that. So do the authors!!
My daughter went to school once dressed as Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (about 6 years old), to be fair she didn't wear the yellow dress from the book but we discussed that very few people would recognise who she was dressed as outside of the commonly accepted blue dress, some little 'gems' dressed as the Disney version of Elsa, Ariel et al picked on her and told her she was meant to come dressed as a character from a book not a cartoon, her telling them to seek out Lewis Carrolls work fell on deaf ears and they hounded her all day despite their own attire. Kids are funny creatures.
But World Book Day isn't just about getting the kids to dress up, i have wonderful teacher friends that create a full day of activities, when i was involved in the right to read scheme i loved planning fun reading activities for my groups to take part in. Now i home educate my daughter we do week long projects leading up to World Book Day and she's reading every day so she's learning more and more about new characters, up and coming authors, writing styles etc. It's all vital learning, you have to consider the bigger picture in my honest opinion. The whole point of World Book Day is to encourage children to read, become interested in reading and to fall in love with some kind of literacy- reading or writing. There are many brilliant publishers that offer worksheets to accompany books that have been published with them, some authors create these themselves. Places like Puffin, Authorfy and the BBC offer videos direct from authors with tidbits about their work, tips for writing yourself and interactive games to play.
I think you really have to make it inclusive- if you're making/ creating/ buying costumes you're naturally spending time with the children you are doing this for, that's a time that you can use to talk to them about the books they're enjoying (if you don't usually). If they're digging out their favourite book to take to school, read it with them, get them to read it to you, discuss it, find out why they love it, discuss their old favourite books from when they were little etc. Suggest they write a letter to their favourite author, just find a way to make reading fun (if you or they don't find it so already).
In short, we love World Book Day.