Póvoa de Varzim City Council and Aver-o-Mar School Group chosen for national joint project: Family Reading
The City Council of Póvoa de Varzim has been selected to apply for the Family Reading Programme, an initiative in partnership with the Aver-o-Mar School Group, and all parties involved are delighted with this approval.
This national programme aims to provide families with the skills and motivation to read with children and young people and is based on four pillars: research; training mediators; actions to empower families to read; and the Family Reading festival. It provides for liaison between families, schools, the municipal library and the municipal social network, all of which were already provided for in the application phase, which included four phases:
Phase 1
– Launch of a research study into existing family reading practices.
– Municipalities apply to the Family Reading Programme, setting up a team comprising a teacher librarian, a municipal librarian and a member of the social network.
Phase 2
– Training of teacher librarians and municipal librarians (45 municipalities by 2024).
– Allocation of PNL funding.
Phase 3
– Organisation of training activities for families in the municipalities.
– Family Reading Festival 2024 (PNL, RBE, DGAE).
Phase 4
– Launch of the Great Family Reading Game in 2025.
Family reading is a strong predictor of students’ success at school and their relationship with books, which led the National Reading Plan to reformulate the existing project aimed at families, centred on access to books via loans. This expansion from an action to a structural programme allows for intervention that empowers families and creates a connection with books and reading for adults and children, in their homes and in the communities in which they live. The family is the basic nucleus of children’s emotional, social and cognitive development. Reading as a family promotes essential literacy skills, builds emotional relationships and creates reading habits.
Having access to books is fundamental, but it’s not enough. You have to know how to choose it and read it together. Realising that the need for access to books is complementary to training in reading and its mediation, the Family Reading programme has now taken on a broader dimension, integrating research, training of trainers, training of families, access to books and participation.
The Family Reading programme is based on the strategy that the National Reading Plan has been implementing: developing reading skills and habits in the territories, training mediators and disseminating practices according to the specific needs of each community.
In 2025, the aim is for this programme to be nationwide, by making reading challenges available in digital format, allowing everyone to take part, which is why this partnership is so important for the school.
