Ant Nanny and a little courage

There are 2,500 books for children and young people published every year in the Czech Republic, but that doesn’t frighten us because we know how to navigate our way through such large numbers of books.

We go through and categorise all new books to help everyone find the right one whether they are a librarian looking for something new for the children’s department, a teacher who is busy but still needs to find truly engaging books for their pupils, or a parent standing in a bookstore lost staring at endless shelves realising that it really is impossible to judge a book by its cover.

Believe us — we understand that feeling.

It doesn’t frighten us either that 53% of children aged 6–8 play electronic games at least once a week. It should come as no surprise that that number rises with age. We are not trying to compete with games for attention but we believe that a book is a powerful tool and can be a good friend when a child gets curious about something.

We do not shy away from topics such as death, migration, or the Holocaust. Children deserve to find answers, as well as ever more questions, about the issues they may encounter in life.

These are the activities that help us realise our pursuits:

• • creating content for the Book Club,
  • running the online course “Guiding Children Towards Reading”,
  • producing webinars filled with book tips on various themes,
  • writing e-books with recommendations for all readers, big and small,
  • creating method sheets for reading lessons for kindergartens, schools, and libraries,
  • bringing Ant Suitcases full of books to our offline seminars,
  • organising the summer reading project “Pročtené léto” (Read All Summer Long), partnered with the original Slovak project, which in its last year involved more than 4,000 people,
  • working with children who choose books they want to write about and publishing their reviews on our website. Our youngest reviewer was six — and all these reviews make good reading,
  • and doing a lot of other ant work to help parents, teachers, and librarians navigate the world of children’s books.  

If you are one of them, contact us at kontakt@mravencichuva.cz