Welcome To The Stay Home Book Club

A new website launched today encourages Kiwi kids to explore new and familiar stories during the national lockdown.

Stay Home Book Club is a new online reading challenge from Read NZ Te Pou Muramura (formerly NZ Book Council). Primary and intermediate-aged children are invited to register for free and choose their team to play for.

In recognition of the fact that it’s more difficult to buy or borrow new books during the Level 4 lockdown, there are various ways that children can log an entry.

They can either read an online or print book they have already read, read a new book, listen to an audio story, or take part in an online library session or similar.

Accompanying the Stay Home Book Club is a list of free online resources for children to choose from.

Many of these resources have been provided by the authors who are part of Read NZ’s Writers in Schools programme.

Players choose an avatar and log the stories they read or listen to, along with a star rating and short review. A leaderboard keeps track of the teams, each named after a New Zealand bird, as they move up and down the rankings accordingly.

Launching on Thursday April 9, the Stay Home Book Club will run for at least four weeks.

Booksellers Tokens are up for grabs as spot prizes every day of the competition, and the top player for each team will win a special book prize, to be sent after the lockdown period.

Read NZ Te Pou Muramura CEO Juliet Blyth says the reading challenge is a fun way to help encourage children to find comfort and delight in stories.

“Our children may be confined by the four walls of their homes at the moment but with reading there is no limit to where your imagination can take you,” she says.

“The Stay Home Book Club is inspired by the Super Smash Reading Challenge we ran over summer in conjunction with NZ Cricket. This seemed like the perfect time to use the platform again, with no sports teams to follow at the moment we decided championing our native birds was a good way to go.

“We’re thrilled to be able to offer this exciting new competition during the lockdown and hope it will be something fun for children and their whānau,” says Juliet.

Read NZ is grateful for the support of Booksellers New Zealand in supplying prizes.

Sign up for the Stay Home Book Club here.

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