Children’s Book Network has been successfully working with children to encourage reading for 13 years. Beginning in Red Hill Informal Settlement (above Simon’s Town), we gave workshops and began developing our reading material with older teenagers and then with our target age-group of ages 10-15. The Red Reading Toolbox Project started here.
A move to Clanwilliam in the Cederberg Mountains of the Western Cape, gave us a base at the Living Landscape Project to grow and develop. Over the next 5 years we gave dozens of workshops, many of them over several days and with a particular focus on Time and Landscape – the first reading material for the Blue Reading Toolbox.
Since 2018 we have been working in the Overberg, in Stanford and Zwelihle (Hermanus) as well as a project in Mitchell’s Plain, interrupted by the pandemic. Covid and lockdown intensified our activities in Stanford, and we delivered 100 reading packs of about 25 pages each to 100 children in De Kop informal settlement every week for 17 weeks. These were shared among siblings and friends and had a considerable reach. We followed the Lockdown Learning project with The Happiness Project in an effort to cheer children who were severely depressed and disoriented until normal school resumed. This material formed the basis of the Green Reading Toolbox.
Since then, we have continued writing and developing a huge archive of reading texts and activities, testing material with children at workshops and planning a publication project that has begun with the Red Toolbox. The first Red Reading handbook (Books and Stories) was published late in 2024 and the other two, (Bravery and Imagination) are complete and will follow early in 2025.
For detailed information on the Reading Toolbox Project, please go to: www.childrensbook.co.za/toolboxes
