The Children, Youth, and Parents Jury is the largest and longest-running reading promotion programme, and has been in place since 2001, bringing together around 900 libraries and schools in Latvia, as well as diaspora centres on all continents. Every year, more than 23,000 participants – children, youth, and their parents – take part in the programme in six different age groups, starting from age 5.
At the beginning of the year, a professional jury selects a diverse range of books – about half of them are original works by Latvian authors, and the other half are translations. Participants read, discuss, and evaluate these books, thereby developing critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.
The programme provides methodological materials for working with jury books for librarians and teachers – worksheets, games, crossword puzzles, discussion-promoting questions, creative writing, and other tasks.
At the end of the programme, the Great Reading Festival is celebrated, in which the creative teams behind the highest-rated books – writers, illustrators, translators, and publishers –are honoured.
The main objective of the programme is to ensure the distribution of high-quality literature and promote a reading culture.
