Reading Aloud at the Just So Festival

Our Young Person's Project Manager Samantha Shipman tells us about Our Read's summer festival experience

Our Read went down to the Just So Festival in Staffordshire last Friday to share the magic of The Unforgotten Coat.  The Just So Festival kindly invited the project to come along and run shared read aloud sessions throughout the day, and they even gave us some free tickets so we could bring two of the young people we work with to the festival. Jessica and Tina had a lovely day exploring the festival site and all it had to offer - they made clay faces, origami penguins, played in the Just So Festival beach, watched live music, and helped us spread the reading revolution by taking part in our group reading sessions and giving out copies of The Unforgotten Coat to people around the site.

The Yurt that we were going to run the reading sessions in was unfortunately out of action…

However it didn’t dampen our spirits, and the glorious sunshine and woodlands made a perfect setting to read in. 

We were hoping that we would see some exciting wildlife in the woods, and we did see a rabbit during one of our walks around the site, but our main wildlife experience was an unusual amount of wasps which enjoyed dive-bombing me… I think my reaction of running away as fast as my legs would carry me kept lots of people entertained.

We all had a really lovely day, and met lots of people who enjoyed sharing the book with us and hearing more about the project - hopefully Our Read will be invited back again next year!