Robert Ten Brink, Meral Polat and Gerda Havertung are participating in the National Reading Breakfast this year. They are part of a huge group of celebrities who will read aloud in schools on Wednesday 24 January.
They do this to emphasize how important it is to encourage children to read more at home.
Other participants include comedian Ryan Panday, presenter Sophie van den Enk, and former actress Maryam Hassouni. Arnhem Mayor Ahmed Markoush, Eindhoven Mayor Jeroen Dijsselbloem, and Princess Laurentian will also read the book, according to the CPNB writers' association.
Children who read a lot develop vocabulary faster, can spell better and learn to understand texts faster. The Reading and Writing Foundation recently announced that the rate of deterioration in children's skills in this area is “more severe than expected.” Teenagers in the Netherlands read worse than their peers in many other countries.
More than one in three Dutch children do not reach a basic reading level. This means that they are unable to understand text and make connections between information in the text and things they already know. In 2012, one in seven children had difficulty with this.
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