Reading Moves
Reading Moves (Mit Lesen mehr bewegen)
Recent surveys show that one in five young Austrians have poor reading skills when they start work. Furthermore, there are 600,000 functional illiterates with insufficient reading comprehension in Austria. In cooperation with the Buchklub, the OMV, the leading oil and gas corporation of Central Europe, has launched the campaign Reading Moves (Mit Lesen mehr bewegen). The Austrian two-time ski-jumping champion and winner of the 4-Schanzentournee 2008/09 Wolfgang Loitzl supports the campaign. For the time being, the project is planned for three years.
The approach towards better reading skills chosen by the partners Buchklub and OMV is so-called Buddy Reading. In many families where not enough time is spent on speaking and reading, literacy and reading culture are not existent. Buddy Reading means that older buddies – parents, brothers and sisters, or school-friends – read to their younger reading partners. This allows them to respond to the individual needs of the younger partners and to strengthen social ties which contribute towards a pleasure in reading. Thus, Buddy Reading is an ideal method for strengthening reading skills.
The campaign consists of three different phases:
> Buddy Reading days in Austrian primary schools
> PHILIPP unterwegs, a special issue of the Buchklub’s magazine PHILIPP, which was distributed to children in all OMV petrol stations in August 2009
> Buddy Reading with adults and celebrities
This project is run by Buchklub der Jugend (Austria)