Nowadays our attention is being pulled in many directions as we multitask during the day – working on a current task on the desk, checking emails, interacting with colleagues, chatting and monitoring our smartphones. All these activities and the low levels of attention, invested in each task, make us less able to focus on a single thing. And as technology develops further with all its creative ways to entertain (and distract) us, we feel more often the need to read books.
This need has become the reason for 28 nonprofit organisations from 21 countries across Europe to unite their knowledge and experience and develop new ideas and strategies to promote reading. EURead believes reading must be a number one government priority in order to have smart and educated people, who are а worthy part of contemporary society.
Literature is actually the easiest way to develop your mental skills like analytical thinking, long and short-term memory, concentration and writing skills. Many researches have shown that reading every day, even for mere 15 minutes, can increase not only intelligence, but also our social skills and empathy.
And if the goal is to have smart adults, we have to first educate the children. That’s why EURead aims to attract parents’ attention and show them the importance of reading to their children every day. The organisation encourages this via numerous activities like promoting local authors and events, for example: National Reading Relay Campaignin Bulgaria, Storytelling and Reading Aloud Dayin Hungary, Children Reading Day– Světknihy in Czech Republic, German Reading Aloud Day, Small Book – Big Person campaign in Poland, Austrian campaign for family literacyand the Greek campaignLiteracy. A human right, a social investment.
If you want to educate your children and help them become smart, creative and independent adults, show them reading is fun, read to them every day and make up your own stories from open ending books, narrate to your kids some of the stories you came across in a book, paper or magazine, showing you are truly interested, make up crosswords with facts from a book you have read, or create a customized literature activity that both of you will enjoy. You could also take part of the book events happening in your country by following the organisations which support the cause. See all of them here.