For many years, Histon & Impington Parish Council has sponsored the Summer Reading Challenge at Histon Library. This enables the County Council to pay for extra staffing hours to prepare, support and deliver the challenge and to help fund a range of supporting activities such as storytimes, craft events and talks by authors and illustrators. Hopefully lots of children will take part this year – just go along to the Library to find out how

Cambridgeshire County Council’s Library Development Manager, Richard Young says “Research shows that reading for pleasure is vital for children’s life chances, and that those who use libraries are twice as likely to be above average readers. The Summer Reading Challenge builds confidence and independent reading, while preventing the dip in children’s literacy levels during the long break from school. Last year’s challenge saw 810,000 children across the UK reading during the summer holidays.”

Histon is always one of the star performers in Cambridgeshire in terms of children participating in and completing the challenge and the library is always a hive of activity throughout the summer. Children love taking part, parents and carers take great pride in seeing their children’s reading achievements rewarded and teachers are thrilled that their pupils are discovering new books and authors throughout the summer and keeping up their reading for pleasure.

The theme for this year’s national reading challenge is “Record Breakers” and it is linked to a country-wide attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records in terms of the most pledges to read books during the summer holidays.