Everton in the Community celebrated World Book Day

Everton in the Community celebrated World Book Day

Everton Ambassador Ian Snodin has been celebrating World Book Day with local students as part of Everton in the Community’s Premier League Primary Stars delivery . The former Everton midfielder was on hand to meet children at Knowsley Lane Primary School located in Huyton earlier today, with all of the students dressed up as characters from their favourite books for the day that celebrates authors, illustrators, reading and – of course – books.

During the visit the Everton in the Community coaches led a Reading Stars session with the pupils which is part of the Premier League Primary Stars programme.

The Premier League started the programme to help develop youngsters’ reading skills through their love of football, encouraging them to engage, and achieve, in literacy by using a range of football-related resources. This literacy lesson involved a special Everton crossword, a reading quiz where students were split into several groups and a match reporting task, finishing with a Q&A session where the former Everton player was quizzed on his favourite books growing up, with a few football-related questions thrown in too.

2 000 Premier League ‘book boxes’ will be delivered to primary schools

Speaking after the Q&A session, Club Ambassador Snodin said: “It’s always great coming out and meeting enthusiastic children in the local community – to help put a smile on their faces is a great feeling and hopefully they’ve all had fun reading today and learnt something. The work Everton in the Community do in the local area is just brilliant – you can just see how engaged the children are with the coaches and how beneficial the work they are doing is.”

As part of the celebrations for World Book Day, the Club were able to present the class with a Premier League ‘book box’ which is part of an initiative where they will be giving away 2,000 to primary school teachers who sign up to the new literacy offer available on the Premier League Primary Stars website. The book boxes, which contain 15 different titles from authors such as Julia Donaldson, Jacqueline Wilson and Dan Freedman, have been created in partnership with the National Literacy Trust.

Olivia Cardwell, the Everton in the Community Primary Schools Coordinator, who was one of the coaches that led the session said: “Today’s session has been brilliant, all of the children have been so engaged with the activity and they loved having Ian here to make their World Book Day extra special this year. The Premier League ‘book-box’ that we were able to present to the class has gone down really well too. There are so many great books inside and when we were leaving all of the children were talking about which books they wanted to read first, which is fantastic and exactly what you want to hear them saying.”

The free online literacy offer from the Premier League, which hosts packs, resources, and lesson plans for teachers, can be found at plprimarystars.com.