We first heard about Readathon from a leaflet about it in our World Book Day pack. As a firm fan & participant of Sponsored Reads in our youth, and having successfully launched the Reading Agency’s Six Book Challenge/Reading Ahead scheme for the past 3 years, we felt that there is a target audience already for students to get involved. From those that are doing the Reading Ahead scheme where they have to read & review 6 items, they could count those same titles as part of their Readathon challenge. Plus of course there are the strong readers in the student community who may like the idea of reading in order to help seriously ill children.

So we ordered a pack of 30 Sponsorship cards as that is how many students are participating in Reading Ahead this year. The pack came really quickly, in a lovely bright orange coloured box so it immediately got us excited as we opened it to find the equally colourful free bookmarks, sponsorship cards that appear really easy to complete with some nice tips from Tony Robinson on the back.

We decided to launch our first ever Readathon on World Book Day as part of our Beyond the Page theme this year as Readathon was a perfect example of how books can benefit our lives beyond the printed form.

We sent out an email to all students explaining how simple Readathon was to be part of and highlighting the benefits it makes to seriously ill children in hospital.

Rebecca Wilson,

College Librarian

Huddersfield New College Library

http://huddnewcoll.ac.uk/