Reading for Pleasure is a relatively new service group, created in 2021, with the aim of promoting reading within ISL and helping make reading more accessible around the world through supporting charities. You may know us from the Second-Hand Book Sale we organize every February or the Middle School Readathon held during April. Reading is not only important for reducing stress and improving your overall well-being, reading also broadens your vocabulary and through engaging your mind, reading helps prevent age-related cognitive decline. Not to mention, a study following 3,635 adults throughout 12 years found that those people who read books lived for around 2 more years than those who only read magazines, other forms of media, or didn’t read at all (Healthline 2019).

This year, we hosted our second annual Second-Hand Book Sale! If you are not already familiar, the premise is that we collect second-hand book donations and then resell them, donating the profits to a charity. This typically runs over the course of a week and books of various genres and languages are available for purchase at recess, lunch, and after school. The aim of this project is not only to raise funds for a charity related to our cause but also to promote reading at ISL by exchanging them within our community at affordable prices. Thanks to the generous donations that we received from the ISL community, we managed to raise 1736.30 CHF which we donated to Room to Read, a non-profit that works to improve literacy and gender equality in education. Additionally, the books that were left over were donated to EVAM as a means of expanding our impact outside of ISL. This year’s book sale was a huge success and we hope that this engagement will continue in the coming years.

Following last year’s success, we reintroduced the Middle School Readathon. The aim of the Readathon is to encourage students to read more for their own enjoyment, giving them around a month in spring to read as much as they can. The minutes read were logged by each student using Track My Read and the top-scoring individuals, as well as the top homeroom received prizes. Knowing that being busy with schoolwork doesn’t help reading motivation, we make sure to make the readathon run over the spring break each year, giving a perfect opportunity to read. The results were exceptional! With a grand total of 30,070 minutes read across all of MS, 11,880 minutes of it being 7CM in first place! We were very impressed by the enthusiasm of the middle school students and are glad that they seemed to enjoy this challenge.

Overall, this year was very successful! We plan to continue hosting our annual events and we hope to see the same level of enthusiasm in the ISL community. If you are interested, next year all high school students are welcome to join. Also, if you don’t know what to read next, check out our monthly book reviews written in The High for recommendations!