Some people almost make you fall asleep when they read to you. With others it’s hard to ignore because it’s so captivating. The latter also applies to Nelly Widholzer from Putzbrunn, who attends the sixth grade at the Emile Montessori School in Neubiberg. Only recently did the eleven-year-old win the school decision in the reading competition that the German book trade association organizes every year for this grade level. In February, the district decision is online, in which Nelly competes with a video against the winners from other schools in the eastern district. Participants will be able to upload the recordings from the middle of this week. A jury will then meet in the Ottobrunn municipal library and evaluate the submitted contributions.
What her trick for good reading is and why she did so well in the first round, Nelly can’t really say. At that time she had even forgotten her own book in order to present a well-known passage from it and then read a passage from “My Summer with Mucks” which she found at school. “I still had a quarter of an hour to practice before the break,” she recalls. She probably benefited from the fact that she knew the book from her school reading the year before.
She also enjoys reading “diary-style” books like “PS: You’re the best,” so she’s used to reading a lot of verbatim. In this way, she also succeeded in depicting scenes clearly in the competition. If you ask her to read a little from this book, it quickly becomes clear: she simply has talent. With her pleasant, soft voice, she sometimes reads in a higher, sometimes in a lower pitch, inserting pauses at appropriate points, for example when friends Emma and Lore write letters about their lives.
Nelly’s great joy in reading comes from the fact that she likes to slip into different roles. She does that often, for example when she is making films with a friend. Favorite comedies and horror movies. The two then have a motif, for example a horror house, and come up with a text for it. When Nelly was younger, she also liked it when her parents or grandma read aloud.
Unlike in the first round of the competition, the participants only have to read out a known text in the district decision. Nelly does not yet know exactly which book she will choose, but she probably wants to present a passage from “PS: Du bist die Beste”. To prepare, she wants to “practice, practice, practice” and read to her parents or her friend. The eleven-year-old doesn’t mind that she won’t be reading live, but for a video. “I think that’s really cool,” she says. In any case, she is used to speaking in front of the camera from her films.