Zoom Ahead with Books

About Zoom Ahead with Books

The Zoom Ahead with Books project is designed to encourage parental involvement and promote children's enjoyment and motivation to read for pleasure.

Each year almost 1000 children and families from 12 local primary schools and services take part, and this project is one of the highlights of the ELI calendar.

One of the key objectives of ELI is to support the literacy development of the children in the Docklands. Through its focus on creative expression, the Zoom Ahead project is accessible to all parents in the community regardless of their literacy levels. This year, we are delighted to also be able to share the resources for parents in English, as well as three further languages are commonly spoken in our community - Polish, Mandarin and Romanian. See the links at the end of the page to these resources.

Each night over the three week programme the children take home a book from the class library, sit, read and discuss the book with their 'book buddy' and then both draw a picture representing the book.

The project finishes with a series of exhibitions of the artwork from the children and book buddies in the schools and NCI, which serves as a celebration of the commitment and effort of all of the families.