By our volunteer, Reni Nagy.
People have different hobbies and different interests. Some prefer reading, some don't. The same is with our students. Some of them love books, some of them have other interests.1
I believe that the people who like reading can trace back the very first book that they really enjoyed, the one that made them fall in love with reading. Mine was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone when I was 10, Sandra's was Aesop's Fables and Louisa's was Percy Jackson. We all share the somewhat different, but still similar feeling of loving to lose ourselves in the pages, the words, a universe we open as we open a book.
This is why we hosted a Read-a-thon event, in fact the third Read-a-thon event in the history of TI. We spent 12 hours from 11 pm to 11 am wandering in different realms: Hogwarts, mythic times in Iceland, imaginary German towns. We read and as we did so, we gave our imagination wings to fly on. We stopped every now and then and took a glance at real life, while sipping some coffee, trying not to fall asleep and eating some snacks to restock for the next chapter. Then...we let ourselves be carried away again. So, it went until 11 am.
We were tired. Couldn't stop yawning. Couldn't wait to go to sleep. Despite the sleepiness, we were filled with something positive. We were smiley and had that good feeling in our hearts. It was the feeling of getting lost in something you love.
This time by reading books. By immersing in an imaginary world.
It was amazing. It was our Read-a-thon.