Due to the coronavirus, it is not possible this year for nursery and primary school children to visit the Kamp-Lintfort campus in person. Instead, the university is taking part in the 17th National Reading Aloud Day with two creative video contributions.
This year, children in Kamp-Lintfort are getting to know the university’s campus and workplaces not in person, but through two creative video messages: Professor Franca Ruhwedel and Professor Torsten Niechoj from the Faculty of Communication and Environment are in front of the camera this time. With the enthusiastic help of a hand puppet and soft toys, the pair are reading aloud from exciting stories, thereby taking part ‘virtually’ in this year’s nationwide Reading Aloud Day.
Prof. Dr Torsten Niechoj reads extracts from Otfried Preußler’s ‘Hotzenplotz’ stories in the university’s largest lecture theatre. In this classic of children’s literature, Kasperl and Seppel want to recover a stolen coffee grinder and catch a robber. To do so, they devise a ruse and drag a chest full of gold through the forest – or at least, the robber Hotzenplotz thinks it is gold. Professor Niechoj discusses with the only student in the lecture theatre – a talking hand puppet – why a robber might be interested in gold at all from an economic perspective.
Prof. Dr Franca Ruhwedel shows the young audience round the Kamp-Lintfort campus and uses an ice-cream parlour as an example to explain what you learn on a business studies degree, before reading aloud from Paul Maar’s *A Week Full of Saturdays* to a makeshift audience of soft toys. The story of the cheeky Sams, who really turns his ‘Dad’, Mr Taschenbier’s, life upside down, is also a classic amongst children’s books and is sure to make the children laugh.
Alongside the university’s staff, numerous prominent figures from Kamp-Lintfort are once again acting as ambassadors for reading this year. Last year, around 700,000 children and readers took part in the nationwide Reading Aloud Day. It is a day of action initiated and sponsored in 2004 by the weekly newspaper *Die Zeit*, the Stiftung Lesen and the Deutsche Bahn Foundation. Further information and image material for further use can be found at www.vorlesetag.de.
Anyone interested can watch the video clips on the Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences’ YouTube channel. For legal reasons, these have been edited to omit the reading section. Teachers and nursery staff at childcare centres and primary schools have already received the full videos.
