Now commencing its fourth year ‘Kids Read’ supported exclusively by HSBC and developed by the British Council, is continuing its work to reach more children and encourage them and their families to read both for pleasure and for learning. Six new schools across the country have been added taking the total in Egypt to 24 participating schools, as part of a wider regional initiative.
The opening ceremony for this season’s programme was held on Sunday 19 October at the British Council in Agouza and attended by Mr Rashad Ramadan, English Language Teaching Counsellor, Ministry of Education and English language teachers from the 24 participating schools.
Children at the event enjoyed the live storytelling session and the lovely songs of super star Boshra who was recently nominated as Goodwill Ambassador for the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Red Card to Child Labour campaign.
The programme receives complete support from HSBC Bank Egypt, which also encourages its employee volunteers to facilitate the smooth running of the initiative.
Ammar Shams, Regional Head of Corporate Sustainability for MENA said, “Kids Read is a perfect platform to raise awareness about the importance of reading. The programme encourages children to adopt reading as a leisure activity, both inside and outside their classrooms. HSBC are proud to play an active role in making this happen together with the British Council.”
As well as launching Kids Read for this academic year, the opening ceremony featured a storytelling session, delivered by Nick Bilbrough, who engaged the audience with lively and charismatic stories from books selected from the Kids Read collection. The English language teachers also benefited from the demonstration of storytelling and reading and writing strategies through an arranged series of teacher training workshops organized for Kids Read participating school teachers.
Jonathan Gayther, Director English, British Council Egypt, said “Reading is a skill that opens up a world of opportunities for children. Good reading habits established early, improve later performance in a range of life skills as well as developing language and critical thinking skills. However, across the region teachers and parents struggle to find ways to motivate children to read and the problem increases when dealing with a foreign language like English.”
Kids Read has reached over 200 schools and directly engaged with 50,000 students, 1000 teachers across eight countries in the MENA region, since the start of the programme in 2011.
The community events are family-oriented and include storytelling for the children, delivered by trained HSBC staff volunteers, arts and crafts activities as well as competitions and workshops for parents.
Kids Read received a Silver Stevie Award in 2012.