Club de Lectura Santa Lucía Nanegal

This August, we expanded our range of educational activities by launching the Club de Lectura Santa Lucía Nanegal (Santa Lucía Reading Club). The initiative was inspired by and is co-financed by Bioparque del Oso, a project run by our friends Teolinda Calle and Renata Muñoz.

The overall objective of the project is to encourage and promote reading among children, young people, and adults — with a particular focus on women — in the region.

As a first step, we have created a pilot project for children and young people from the Nanegal parish. The idea is to bring together a group of young readers to talk about their favorite books, read together, exchange opinions and recommendations, and inspire each other to discover new stories and authors.

On August 15, we invited 11 youngsters between the ages of 9 and 18 to our first session. Most of them already had some experience reading books and brought along a few of their favorites. More than half of the participants took the opportunity to present one of their favorite books to the group, leading to lively discussions about the stories, characters, and ideas they had discovered, as well as plenty of recommendations for future reading.

During the three-hour session, we also explored different literary genres and took a closer look at how diverse the individual reading preferences within the group were.

At the end of the session, several participants exchanged books or lent books to one another — a wonderful, spontaneous way of sharing their enthusiasm for reading.

Our next session is planned for three weeks from now. This time, we will invite a somewhat younger group, possibly with less experience in reading and books. We hope to explore different ways of encouraging children not only to discover books, but to develop a lasting interest in reading itself.

For now, this is a pilot project, with one session planned per month until the end of the year. We are excited to see where this little experiment will take us!

If you would like to learn more about our Reading Club or are interested in supporting the project, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.