Some creative ideas to keep you busy while staying at home

If you’re looking for ideas of what you can do while at home, there are some great online resources. Here are just a few!

The Stay-at-Home! Literary Festival
The Stay-at Home! Festival was created by writer CJ Cooke in partnership with Paper Nations. It is a free and completely online festival with workshops, readings, panels and Q&A sessions by writers that you can enjoy from home.

The programme features over 200 authors and 130 events from 27th March until 11th April 2020, with subjects ranging from poetry to novel writing and publishing, wellbeing and mindfulness.

To join in, you don’t need to sign in or register – just click on the links provided on the website. You will be admitted to a virtual ‘waiting room’, and from there your host will give you access to the event.

stayathomelitfest.co.uk

Audible
Audible currently have a range of free to listen to audio books for children which also include a number of literary classics.

Audible.com

The National Theatre
Enjoy access to world-class theatre from your own home! You can watch performances via YouTube as they are made available.
Coming soon: Jane Eyre and Treasure Island.

nationaltheatre.org.uk

Smartify App
Smartify started as a means of making art, galleries and museums more accessible. Smartify has made all of its tours free for the rest of the year via their free app which you can download from Android or Apple stores. Among the audio and visual tours now free to listen to, is a Masterpieces of the Louvre tour which takes people from the Great Sphinx of Tanis to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin of the Rocks.

smartify.org

Gardeners’ World
With more time to spend on the garden and the weather getting warmer, the Gardeners’ World website is a great resource for garden advice and inspiration including garden jobs by month.

gardenersworld.com

And don’t forget YouTube!
There are so many online tutorials from drawing and photography tips to crochet and macramé and so much more!

Thanks to marchnetwork.org for the inspiration!

COVID-19 Information

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we have taken the difficult decision to suspend all Read Easy activities until further notice.
This unfortunately includes reading coaching sessions due to
‘social distancing’ advice.

Please continue to get in touch with our local groups for future volunteering opportunities and reader referrals. Visit the ‘find a group’ page on our website for group contact information.

Read Easy in the Press

In an article relating to World Book Day (5th March), Our CEO Ginny Williams-Ellis spoke to The Bookseller about the growing crisis of adult literacy in the UK.

England is the only country in the developed world where literacy levels are worse in the younger generation (16-24) than in those approaching retirement. In 2013, the literacy levels of England’s 16-24 year olds were ranked 22nd out of 24 developed countries by the intergovernmental economic organisation, the OECD.

That’s a lot of parents who cannot support their children’s reading, a lot of parents for whom the words ‘World Book Day’ make them feel sick to their core. Many of these parents don’t even enter a doctor’s surgery when they are ill because they are frightened that they will be asked to read something or fill in a simple form, and for them the doors of Waterstones seem to resemble the gates of a kingdom they are forbidden from entering. Such is the shame many parents feel at not being able to read, they find it easier instead to hide the reading books their children bring home from school, so they are not faced with being asked to read with them.

We remain the only national charity providing confidential one-to-one coaching for people who are struggling to read. The coaching is delivered by trained volunteers through a network of affiliated locally-run volunteer groups. Reading pairs meet twice a week at approved local venues to work for just half an hour at a time through a structured, phonics-based reading programme. It’s a simple model, but it’s a model that works and we are changing lives forever.

You can read the full article here: