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World Book Day is a charity whose biggest focus is to help change children and young people’s lives by inspiring a love for reading together, and building the reading for pleasure habits that enable them to become readers for life.
World Book Day was created in 1995 by UNESCO as a global celebration of books and reading. It’s marked in over 100 countries all over the world, and aims to foster a love of reading in every child so they can go on to do great things. In the UK and Ireland, it’s perhaps most famous for creating greater access to reading by distributing £1 books via schools and nurseries.
In 2020 and 2021, the impact of World Book Day was enormous, even though the world was still getting to grips with a new way of living and learning. They gifted over a million £1 books a year to young people in the UK and Ireland and encouraged 25 million minutes of shared reading! It’s also worth noting that 3 in 10 children receiving free school meals said that the title they bought using their book token was the first book that they had of their own.
The World Book Day ethos centres on the idea that it’s the act of reading, not educational background, parental income, or family circumstances, that is the biggest indicator of a child’s future success. It’s their mission to see children from disadvantaged backgrounds develop a lifelong love of books because of the huge positive changes that it can make to their quality of life. It’s all about forming the habit of reading for pleasure and finding out what weird and wonderful journeys books can take you on.
Another way that you can share your love of reading is by getting involved with Succeed With Dyslexia’s DEAR for Dyslexia campaign in March and April. This is where we celebrate DEAR time – that's ‘Drop Everything and Read’ time – and focus on people reading in whichever way suits them best – whether that’s alone or with friends, aloud or cosied up quietly, using assistive tech or reading supports. It’s all about making reading for pleasure something that everybody can enjoy, and sharing the knowledge and inspiration that can really make a difference when it comes to helping people with dyslexia confidently read and succeed.
So that’s why today we’re all about sparking that passion for reading in any way that you can – and you could try out some of our favourite after-school (or even weekend!) reading activities for kids today if you wanted to celebrate World Book Day in your own home. It’s all about making reading fun, and creating a comfortable place in children and young people’s lives where they can develop a love for books, as well as the technology and assistive devices that they might need to make the experience easier – and we’d love to see your pictures and videos too, so don’t forget to tag us with #DEARforDyslexia and #SucceedWithDyslexia on socials so that we can re-share your fun.
📚 Outdoor Reading! We’re not talking about doing anything that could compromise your safety here, so put the roller-skates down… but there’s definitely something to be said for changing up your reading environment once in a while! Wrapping up and taking your favourite read out into nature can be a fun way of varying the reading experience, and kids can often find it really enriching if they’re learning about things that are in their immediate interest and environment. Try taking a walk together and reading in the park, or in any green spaces close to you – just remember to stay safe (and maybe bring a snack or two, too).
📚 Book Club! Reading together is a great way to feel close to your friends and family as well as inspiring an enduring love for reading, and reading through books together gives you great opportunities to discuss them and really get a feel for the narrative. Although it’s more of a commitment and less of a quick 30-minute activity, it’s a wonderful way of embedding books into recreational spaces and making reading feel more fun and interpersonal, as well as strengthening social bonds in a time when we’re all still recovering from extended periods of social distancing and remote learning.
📚 Poetry, Please! One great form of media for inspiring a love of reading is poetry, especially rhyming poems or funny ones. You could try reading them aloud together if your child’s comfortable with that, or reading along with ones in a podcast or a video, or even just snuggling down with some hot chocolate and some funny verse before bedtime. Under a lot of systems, children don’t tend to be exposed to poetry in any big way until they hit a fairly advanced stage of education in literacy, and it’s a shame because many of them find it much easier to vibe with as it often feels much less complex and demanding than prose. Just don’t leave that copy of Lord Byron’s poems around, you know- the one that you bought to impress your friends and is currently living a wonderful second life as a coaster. Nobody deserves to spend their World Book Day with Byron.
📚 Cooking and Learning! We’re not just saying this because we’re still a bit caught up emotionally in the fact that Pancake Day is only once a year… but cooking is a great way of strengthening reading skills! Recipes can provide a really fun way of making reading an interactive experience, and there are hundreds of websites and books out there that specialize in easy and safe recipes for children and adults to cook through together.
We love books – and we love the idea of everybody being able to access them, too. Head on over to www.dearfordyslexia.org to find out more about how you can advocate for reading for everybody, as well as how to get involved with our fun program of events and giveaways that’s taking place this spring.
