I am an amateur writer and a professor of language, and I started a project to promote reading to preschool and lower grades school children and share audio books with them. I like to think of myself as a new sort of superhero – a Book Women. Since my journey is not supported like the ones of my fellow colleagues Batman and Ironman, I would like to invite you to provide financial support to my project.
How I thought of this project? We are witnessing that children today spend more time using computers, smartphones and other electronic devices, instead of enjoying books, play and crafts, which badly affects their brain development and ability of creative thinking and expressing.
My very unique project "Čigralište" (pretty untranslatable, and close to a hybrid of words whirligig and playground) is focusing on children and adults who believe in power of fairy tales, short stories and poetry.
On my website www.bajke.me you can find audio tales/books. Together with my enthusiastic family and friends I also organize hands-on, action-oriented workshops for pre-schoolers and children of lower grades of primary schools.
From May 2018, we organized more than 30 workshops, presenting different children books from all over the globe. We discussed these books with children aged 4-8 years, emphasizing the most important messages and always letting children express themselves through drawing, painting, colouring and other forms of art.
Reading to children has a positive impact on concentration, thinking processes and speech development, while creative activities increase attention, patience, and positively influence the development of fine motor skills. Through our workshops, we have brought culture to children and hopefully inspired them to read more and be creative.
We have also learnt a lot from them, and we will share just some of the beautiful thoughts we heard during the workshops:
- “Of all emotions, I love the emotions I have for ice cream the most”, Maxim J., 4.5 years;
- “Before we mock somebody, we have to think about the feelings of that friend”, Petra V., 6.5 years;
- “We all get scared sometimes, but we have to talk about these fears with Mom and Dad, they will know what to do”, Balša M., 5 years;
- “Frida (Kahlo) is wonderful because she taught us to never give up”, Martina V. 5 years;
- “I was afraid of the heights, but then I climbed onto the scaffold and saw that it was not terrible”, Dejan J., 7.5 years old;
- “Santa Claus is thinking of both bad and good children, but we should always try to be good”, Sofia I, 5.5 years old.
Our main goals when working with children and the once you will be supporting through your contributions are:
- Connect verbal and written aspects and enrich children’s vocabulary;
- Support the development of observing, analysing and memorizing facts;
- Support the development of creative thinking and imagination;
- Support understanding of others' and our own feelings;
- Encourage children to demonstrate how they understood the stories through drawing, painting, modelling, movement, singing and acting;
- Encourage the development of moral values and humanitarian messages;
- Support the parents to understand the importance of reading to young children.
We made a plan for 20 activities – workshops and book presentations starting from October 2019 to August 2020. We also plan to make super cool art prints, postcards, t-shirts with project logo and unique art projects made by the children during the workshops. At the end of the project we will make a book about our workshops, with short stories about each workshop, as well as art made by the children.
In order to buy more books, travel and organize more workshops in different cities, buy all the necessary materials for kids crafts and arts, design and print certificates and prepare a book with stories from our journey, we need 12,000 $. If you are not able to financially contribute, please use Indiegogo share tools and share the information about the campaign with your friends and acquaintances.
All of our workshop participants will be promoted to superheroes: Book Girls and Book Boys because everybody loves a Book Hero!
