The Story Box Breakfast – celebrating our Nurseries project

By Vish Amarasinghe, Communications Intern

The Lord Mayor of Liverpool reads to the young readers from our Nurseries project

Today marks a week since The Reader celebrated its fruitful shared reading project across nurseries in Liverpool. For the past nine months, we have worked with 37 city nurseries to deliver shared reading groups, encouraging parents and their children to enjoy books and reading for pleasure in a fun, relaxed and friendly environment at a crucial stage in Early Years development. Outcomes of the project have been felt by all involved; parents have gained confidence to read aloud with their children, nursery practitioners have developed their skills in reading aloud with children, and our young readers have enjoyed some brilliant stories.

The Story Box celebration took place at the Walker Art Gallery on Thursday 8^th October. Children, parents and staff from three Liverpool nurseries were in attendance, as well as very special guests the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Liverpool!

We estimate we have reached over 500 children and 100 carers through the project, while providing training to over 50 nursery practitioners. 96% of participating parents surveyed from January to May 2015 agree that they are now more confident in reading aloud to their children, and that they know more about the value of reading regularly with their children.

The project is part of the City of Readers campaign, which aims to transform Liverpool into the UK's foremost reading city starting with the youngest readers to encourage a love of reading that will last through their lifetime. One of our project workers told us about the impact of the project on the two-year olds involved and their families:

'A little boy who hadn’t shown any interest in reading, came over to a reader and handed a book to her to read, joining in with the book and pointing at the pictures. The nursery staff took a photograph and presented this to his Mum, who cried with happiness when she saw it because she had never seen him sat with a book before!’

Young readers meet the Story Time Penguin

We celebrated with pastries, cake, and balloons, and the highlight of it all was a special shared reading session. The Lord Mayor himself led the reading from Shh, We Have A Plan!, the superbly illustrated children’s book by Chris Haughton, to the children’s delight. Our project workers, who have been working hard across the city these past nine months, also led reading and songs. The children were entranced by the stories that were shared, and their engagement was a real testament to the success of the project.

Our Story Time Penguin mascot was a big hit with the kids, who were thrilled when they received high fives from him and when he joined in the songs and dancing, before helping the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress give out Story Time boxes filled with books, a blanket and a special penguin puppet for each nursery.

Neil Mahoney, coordinator of the Nurseries Project, told us how the end of the project is in fact the beginning of a new chapter:

"We’re delighted that not only did the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress celebrate the success of the nurseries project with us, but that the event launched our distribution of 300 Story Time Boxes in the coming weeks to participating nurseries across the city – boxes containing more than 2,000 books in total! We hope through this legacy that Story Times will continue to encourage reading for pleasure among young children and help give them the best start in life."

The Storyboxes handed out by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Liverpool, assisted by the Story Time Penguin

The event was a fantastic celebration of the Nurseries Project and of all the hard work that had gone in to it. Thank you to everyone who came along!

Learn more about the impacts of our projects with children and young people, including sharing stories in Early Years, on our website: http://www.thereader.org.uk/what-we-do-and-why/education-young-people