A READING SPOT IN A PRIMARY HEALTH CENTRE: PROMOTING CHILDREN‘S READING AND WELLBEING

Language acquisition is a progressive conquest, improved by positive linguistic experiences during childhood; the more satisfactory these experiences are, the better this acquisition will be. Moreover these are related with emotional wellness and intellectual progress that improves children wellbeing. Family environment is crucial for this process. Reading together gives parents and children the possibility to interact free of obligations and to strengthen the emotional links. By other hand, factors such as socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity and parental education can affect children’s development of oral language skills. The aim of this project is to enabling a spot for reading and book borrow, within the Primary Health Centre (PHC) to promote pleasant reading for children and their families. During 2014 our PHC was recruited in a major project, where 4 Centres were benefited with a reading spot, by the initiative of Libroalegre Library of Valparaiso. In 2015, the reader spot was implemented. At the beginning, it was consisted of a bookcase with 142 high literary quality books for children, from 0 to 12 year old, nowadays there are 170 books. 4 Voluntaries from the community were recruited for manage the book borrow system. A training program was carried out by the Library team along the year 2015. Up today 167 families are members. 361 book borrows have been done. Practically, there was not lost and damaged books, just 5 and 4, respectively. This experience talks about an intersectoral, participatory process that enables families through literature, improve children´s development and wellbeing.