The We Love Reading Program is about local volunteers reading aloud to children in their neighborhoods in the COVID 19 context at home. As schools are shutting and children are at home, the “We Love Reading” program is an online program for parents and community members to learn to read aloud to their children in a fun way and keep them engaged with learning.
The training included learning the importance of reading aloud for fun to change mindsets to create change-makers for both adults and children. The program trains you on how to read aloud for fun and how to start read-aloud sessions in your local neighborhoods on a regular basis. Reading to children should be in the mother tongue language of the child.
To increase the reach of the program, we have partnered with Greater Translogic Advisory Services from South Africa to host our online training for free. This enabled us to have unlimited users and now we are translating the training into seven languages: Chinese, Persian, Spanish, Luganda, Vietnamese, Macedonian, and Somali to make the training accessible by native speakers of these languages from around the world. We want to reach ten languages by the end of the year, so if you want the training to be translated in your native language contact us on this email. This is especially important at this time because schools are closing for the corona virus and We Love Reading becomes a placeholder to keep children engaged with learning in a fun way so that when education opportunities are available they will be motivated to seek these opportunities and engage with learning.
Also the We Love Reading program fosters resilience and wellbeing among the women, men, youth -reading and the children and parents. Everyone is engaged in a human-human interaction that foster positive mental health.
The We Love Reading program is an international renowned program that is evidence based in collaboration with international universities such as Brown University, Chicago University, NYUAD and Queen Mary University. It won the UN Science, technology and innovation award and the UNESCO international Literacy Award and the WISE award. The New York Times ran an article about it last May.
WLR has also been shown to reduce stress and anxiety boosting mental health and resilience among vulnerable populations such as lower Socio economic status and refugees.
Here is what we did to make it possible for you to be engaged in the program:
- We launched our free open online course for we love reading in two languages (English and Arabic)
- Posting on our social media and YouTube channel WLR ambassadors from around the world reading aloud to children in their local language. You can share these with your children. You can learn from our WLR ambassadors to start reading aloud to your children YouTube
- We are collecting stories from around the world of WLR Ambassadors experience and posting them on Social media (Facebook, Twitter).
WLR is about reading for fun
WLR is reading aloud to create changemakers
WLR is reading aloud to change mindsets
WLR makes learning fun
WLR foster reading for pleasure
WLR is about parent child engagement
WLR is about youth reading to children for fun
WLR is about grandparents reading to children for fun
WLR is about parents reading to children for fun
WLR is about children falling in love with reading
WLR is about creating purpose for all