Chatty Kidz, an online educational platform focused on teaching children to read, is working with the NRL and Macmillan Education to engage young fans with fun, collaborative reading activities.
The NRL already has many of its star players involved in educational activities to help children learn, with Chatty Kidz now allowing more children to be reached through digital education.
Chatty Kidz allows children to explore books by watching videos featuring different people reading to them, encourages reading with a huge library of digital levelled books, allows families to create and share their own content, and to track a child's reading progress over time.
Parents can receive reading tips and advice from educational experts based on their child's reading, with activities that engage children, teachers and entire families.
"It's not easy to attract the interest of all children with books and reading, particularly the levelled books which have been written with an educational purpose in mind," Ken Taggart, founder of Chatty Kidz, said.
"Using the power of sport and the profile of players, we hope to engage thousands of kids who are NRL fans and introduce them to a series of levelled books that they want to explore and read."
Former Kangaroos and NSW State of Origin star Nathan Hindmarsh has put his voice to two books so far – "NRL Lunchbox" and "State of Origin". These books are two of 24 in the "League Stars" series.
With each book purchased you get:
• A digital copy of the book to read anywhere, anytime in your Chatty Kidz account.
• Access to the streaming video reading session by Nathan Hindmarsh, which kids can watch as often as they want on any device.
• One month access to a huge library of digital books covering reading difficulty levels 1-30. These books are not just NRL-based books, also have streaming video of various people (i.e. children, grandparents) reading the story to them, modelling fluent reading.
For more information on the books go to chattykidz.com
