About 50 percent of young Bulgarians, aged 15 – 29 admitted they hadn’t read a single book over the past year, while 14 percent had never done it, a 2012 research showed. According to the PISA international research Bulgaria bottoms the literacy chart. This means that Bulgarian students can handle tasks, related to the finding and extraction of information from different text sources, but find it hard to comprehend and analyze what they have read. Such alarming trends provoke a series of initiatives, aiming to overcome them. Fun Summer Reading is one of those, which will have its 4^th edition this year with the purpose to encourage reading with kids, aged 6 – 12. The Az-deteto.bg and Sofia Library are the organizers of the Internet portal. Those have used the opportunities of contemporary technologies, in order to be in pace with time and to attract the attention of the kids more easily. Each child can register into a specially created website with a list of compulsory literature for the 1 – 7 grades, along with other interesting titles. A digital reader’s diary enlists the books, read by the child and answers questions, related to those. The most reading city, school, kid and children’s book for summer 2014 will be selected, based on the data collected in the end of the campaign. It turns out that Ruse has read the most over the past couple of years. The initiative includes lots of fun events, again aimed at the encouraging of reading among children. Young writers have been invited as its messengers and those participate actively in the meetings with the kids. The organizers plan to visit several Bulgarian cities and towns this year: Dobrich, Shumen, Razgrad, Veliko Tarnovo, Vidin and Montana. The campaign will go throughout the summer and will end in September. It kicked off these days with a national round table, subjected: “Reading – a path to better literacy”. It was under the auspices of Sofia Mayor Yordanka Fandakova.

“We gift 2,700 books to schools on the eve of May 24”, Mayor Fandakova said. “Last year we organized evenings of writers Ivaylo Petrov and Leda Mileva and kits of their books were gifted then to 150 schools and 58 kindergartens. Together with the Zakhari Stoyanov publishing house we work on a project that gives an opportunity to organize meetings of Sofia students with Bulgarian historians, writers and public figures. They have visited more than 10 schools so far and the meetings have been really interesting. We all have to support and stimulate reading, love for books and at the same time we have to work with the kid, in order for it to be able to comprehend what’s been read, regarding real life skills. Bulgarian education needs that change for the purpose of better results.”

Preslava Georgieva is one of the “Zaedno V Chas” /Together in Class/ teachers – a programme, aiming to provide education of good quality to each child. The young lady teaches Bulgarian and literature at the Zlatitsa country town. She says she stimulates the children to read by giving real time examples, related to the stories.

“It is essential that the students see us reading,” Preslava says. “If I only explain how important reading is, but they never see me with a book, it will obviously all look fake. That is why last year I tried to sit on a blanket in front of the school building last year and to read. I had “accidentally” other 5 -6 books in my rucksack, in case someone decided to come and read with me. If they have the book in their hands, the kids have no problem with reading, i.e. they do not avoid it.”

English version: Zhivko Stanchev