Last Saturday, we were the honoured guests of a very well organised and intimate blogger event organised by McDonald’s UK, as part of their current Happy Readers campaign.
McDonald’s Happy Readers campaign was created to put more books into the hands of families, with recent research from the National Literacy Trust showing that only half of children enjoy reading and almost one in seven don’t have a book of their own. Since the campaign launched, McDonald’s has fast become one of the UK’s biggest book distributors and have given away over 32.8m million books via their Happy Meals and online.
Young at Art, Northern Ireland’s leading arts provider for children and young people, were invited along for an “extraordinary” story telling session and they did marvelously in bringing to life excerpts from Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” to the utter delight of their young audience!
The choice of Matilda for the story telling session was not coincidental, as in a new inter-generational UK survey by McDonald’s, the book, first published in the UK in 1988, was revealed to be the most read book in Belfast, with 56% of book lovers having been enthralled by the story.
What did we think of the event?
We loved the special attention the children received from the moment we arrived: the warm welcome, the face painting and the interaction with the lovely (and very talented!) Young At Art actresses, all made possible by the intimate space and the lovely settings!
We were delighted to learn of the new Happy Studio app and its new Roald Dahl feature, which allows for some quite special sound effects while the eight specially created books, included in the Happy Meal at the moment, are being read :-)! There are also plenty of other activities the app provides for the smaller children, which we did try out while there, like puzzles and dot to dot activities.
We enjoyed a morning of fun, learned so much about the amazing work of the Happy Readers campaign and we left with a host of brilliant tips from the National Literacy Trust to make reading more fun at home and get our family to read even more together!
Do check my little reader in this video of the event:
Disclaimer: we were invited as bloggers to the event and were served a McDonald’s meal of our choice. The opinions expressed in this blog post are entirely our own.
Mama's Haven 
Now this is a great night out ha… I love that they have Roald Dahl books with happy meals x
Lovely pics and a great sounding event (fab to have actors there). Matilda is a great book – the show is brilliant too!
Oh what a fab event. I love anything that immerses children in the amazing literature that is available to them
Oh, how I love Matilda! It’s an interesting choice of story to promote reading, because Matilda herself showed an eagerness for books.
We’ve been to McDonalds and got a book with the Happy Meal – so much better than those plastic toys that just get thrown away!
I like your review style, Mama. Very authentic :). Would love to feature your reviews in our weekly curated email digest that goes out to thousands of people.
Thank you, Jessica. If you mention my posts, could you please add a link to the blog and use fragments of the reviews, not the whole lot, as that would give us trouble with Google bots?
Best regards,
Oana
Sure thing. If you let me know your email we’ll send you the details. Thanks 🙂
What a wonderful event to attend – I love things that encourage children to read
This is what I call a great night out :-)!Matilda is an awesome character and a book that every kid should read.
Roald Dahl is a legend isnt he! We dont really eat at McDonalds (we are all veggies) but love that they are encouraging enjoying reading.
Sounds like a brilliant event, love the photos too! I had a McDonald’s for the first time in ages recently – so much easier now with the pre-booking. We must get Matilda here, POD would love it now she’s a bit bigger x