STREAMing through Europe

According to The Reading and Writing Foundation, 1 in 5 people in Europe are having difficulties reading, writing and digital skills. That are 70 million Europeans who therefore cannot fully participate in our society. Almost a quarter of the students run the risk of becoming low-literate. Of the young people, 24% cannot read at the desired level. This is the level to be able to understand a text well. For example, they have difficulties extracting the right message from a text and thereby linking the right conclusions to a text. Around 60% of the youth reads because they simplyhave to, instead of from their own interests or pleasure. Reading is seen by many young people as a waste of time. We are convinced reading education should be given a new boost, it is important that young people enjoy reading more and get more pleasure in reading. Only then, the reading results of our students will increase again. In the project “STREAMing through Europe”, the partners from Ireland, Croatia, Greece, Portugal and The Netherlands worked together to increase reading pleasure in the shorter term and to improve the reading results from the pupils involved in the project on a long term. Reading pleasure has an important role in reading. Students who enjoy reading, often read more and better, which increases the pleasure even further. In addition, students who have confidence in their own ability to read will enjoy reading more than students who have a negative self-image when reading (OECD, 2019). According to the three-yearly Pisa survey (Programme for International Student Assessment) the European results in reading skills were in 2018 significantly down compared to the years before. This was and it still is a great concern for us. We think reading education in our countries should be given a new boost. It is important that young people enjoy reading more. When reading becomes fun again, young people will read more and will improve their reading skills in a natural way. This potential longer term benefit was the reason for us to participate in this project. Our overall objective was to improve the interaction between our different countries and to learn our pupils that we are all European citizens who can and must learn from each other. By meeting, working, reading, writing and having fun together, we have learned to understand each other and therefore we can build more mutual respect. In the end we are all European citizens with a shared responsibility for each other. Our main objective was and will be, to promote reading pleasure and to make young people aware of the great importance of reading. The capitals used in “STREAMing through Europe” have the following meanings: Science Technology Reading Engagement Art and Music. By using all this school subjects and by connecting them we have caused a big stream of reading pleasure in Europe. The result of the collaboration in this project is not only to be seen in the improving of reading pleasure among the participating pupils ánd teachers, but also in some beautiful books composed of the most original stories and poems created, written and illustrated by the pupils from our schools. Also a perfect way to disseminate our project results. On our track to that results we worked in all our schools and with all pupils on stories and books written by famous authors of each country. Of course, while doing that, we used the school subjects that appear in the name of our project: “STREAMing through Europe”! We have noticed that during the project, pupils enjoyed reading more because of all the activities aroud it. By creating a dance or a song, a drawing, a poem, a play or a quiz, pupils became involved and started looking for more nice stories to read and process in different ways. That means something for us and for all our teachers. We really hope that this method of bookpromotion will continue to provide more reading pleasure in the future for all pupils in our schools!