Making a difference

An afternoon of royalty, party games and birthday cake at Kensington Roof Gardens is not at all unpleasant. But for the other 364 and a half days of the year, Booktrust is out in communities up and down the country making sure that every child has access to books and the tools they need to become readers.

Here are just three reminders of why we do what we do.

This email came in just after National Bookstart Week:

'My son is due to start school in September, and being autistic, I worked really hard to instill reading as a pleasure, rather than a chore. He now loves anything by Julia Donaldson and can recite The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child by heart. Unfortunately, being autistic, he's also very destructive and regularly 'hides' things. As a result Squash and a Squeeze has been replaced a couple of times and George (The Smartest Giant in Town) is missing.

Imagine his delight when he opened his Bookstart pack and discovered George in there!

I just wanted to say, you've made a little boy, who sees the world in a completely different way to you and I, but is learning about the pleasures found in reading, VERY happy.'

And this came in from a mother of a two-year-old who had just received one of our Booktouch packs - designed for babies and toddlers who are blind or visually impaired:

'The Booktouch pack was such a welcome surprise. It was a very important moment on our journey from diagnosis to living with visual impairment. To know that someone had thought of my son and to cater for his needs in the form of this pack was very meaningful to us. Before we had our Booktouch pack, he hadn't been very interested in books apart from chewing the corners. However, having carefully-chosen books alongside the very useful information was a positive step forward in understanding how the right resources and intervention can really help a child's development alongside his sighted peers.'

And finally, we had this feedback from Anna Fleming from the Reader Organisation in Liverpool who help to deliver our Letterbox Club parcels to children in care:

'I have had some really positive feedback about the Letterbox parcels. The young people I work with often ask, "When's the next one coming?!" Last week, I gave a parcel to a child who had just had contact, so he was quieter and more dejected than usual. The parcel really made him smile and he loved everything he got. Normally he has a lot of difficulty sitting still while I read to him but he happily sat for the whole hour, colouring in his new notebook (with new felt pens), then begged me to stay an extra 20 minutes to read The High Street with him.'

These stories, and thousands more like them, show just how valuable and life-changing Booktrust's reader programmes are. You can show your support for our work in helping every baby, toddler and child to become readers, by making the Bookstart 20 pledge