Save the Children honours Reading Promotion in All-Day and After-School Care: University of Applied Sciences Potsdam supports LeseOasen Competition

The award recognises the creation of a reading-friendly environment and the implementation of recreational educational and children's rights-based activities to promote reading. Save the Children provides an extensive digital toolbox for this purpose.

Prof. Dr. Friederike Lorenz-Sinai from the Department of Social and Educational Sciences is a member of the jury that will jointly decide on the winning entries. A total of ten representatives from professional associations and academia work together on the jury. The work of the adults is complemented by a children's jury.

Reading oases for all-day and after-school centres

Promoting reading is fundamental to realising the right to education. After all, reading is a key skill for a successful educational biography in and after school and the basis for social participation. All children deserve the same opportunities to learn to read successfully. At the same time, an approach based on children's rights, which also takes into account children's participation and protection rights, helps to make reading promotion programmes more effective.

With the Postbank-funded project "LeseOasen – Leseförderung im Ganztag", the children's rights organisation Save the Children has been supporting all-day primary schools and after-school care centres since 2018 in encouraging children to read and offering them access to books. The design of reading-friendly rooms and the implementation of the reading promotion programme "An die Geschichten, losgelesen" are the central building blocks of the project.

The focus on all-day primary schools is a deliberate choice. After all, all-day schooling has the potential to make a decisive difference for more educational equality with educational programmes that offer free time. "All-day and after-school centres are good places to promote reading. The successful acquisition of reading skills, especially for children with less of a connection to books, requires a combination of reading promotion both inside and outside the classroom," emphasises project manager Johannes Freund.

The competition

So far, around 100 all-day schools and after-school centres with a total of 18,000 children have benefited from the project. Save the Children is launching a ReadingOasis competition on the 23^rd of April 2023, World Book Day, to increase the number. "We want to reach even more all-day primary schools and children across the country with this competition," says Florian Westphal, Managing Director of Save the Children Germany. "Because every child deserves the same conditions for an independent start in life and this is exactly where the ReadingOases come in."

All-day primary schools and after-school care centres for primary school children that have not yet taken part in the project are invited to design ReadingOases with their pupils and take part in the competition. The main prize is endowed with 2000 euros and will be awarded by a children's jury. A further three prizes, each worth 1000 euros, will be awarded by the jury of adult experts. The award ceremony will take place in April 2024. All-day primary schools and after-school centres can now register for the competition without obligation.

The competition is supported by actress Ulrike C. Tscharre. As a long-standing ambassador for Save the Children, she is also the patron of the competition. "The LeseOasen competition is a unique opportunity to campaign for greater educational equality," says the actress: "Bringing the written word to life is my job as an actress and audiobook narrator. That's why this project is particularly close to my heart. All children should have the same chances and opportunities, and reading is very important for this. It is the basis for a good education and a promising future."

The digital toolbox

The children's rights organisation has created a freely accessible digital toolbox for the competition to make it easier to design the ReadingOasis and implement the activities. This includes videos that provide easy access to topics such as participation in room design, book and media selection or dialogue-based reading aloud. Worksheets go into the topics in more depth, show the didactic principles of reading and provide information on the connection between reading promotion and children's rights.

More information on the conditions of participation and how you can register for the competition can be found here: www.lesen-im-ganztag.de and www.lesen-im-hort.de. Additional information about the ReadingOasis project sponsored by Postbank can be found here: www.leseoasen.de.

The LeseOase - Trailer