A Surrey student signed up more than 300 children for free reading workshops

A Grade 12 student in Surrey has signed up more than 300 children for free reading workshops she started this year. CBC News reported on October 27, 2026, that Helen Liu founded Tales with Teens after welcoming eighth-graders to her school and watching them struggle with puzzles and trivia. The sessions are online workshops and boot camps. About 30 high-school volunteers help. Liu said there have been three rounds since the first program in January.

She told CBC she is worried that younger students will lean on artificial intelligence before they have had time to build their own reading. A separate analysis by McGill associate professor Adam Dubé, drawn from about 24,600 Canadian students in 897 schools, found that teens who use AI every week scored about two years behind those who never use it. Nineteen percent said they use AI every day in school to learn. Twenty-one percent said they almost never do. Eighteen percent said they use it once or twice a week to generate text for assignments. That research is not a score for Liu's workshops.

Grade 7 student Shreya Banka said a summer boot camp helped her spot themes such as foreshadowing, and that it made her notice things she used to skip. Simon Fraser University professor Stuart Poyntz called the project encouraging because the teenagers are asking students to do the thinking themselves. Liu hopes to reach more children. The checked numbers are the sign-ups, the volunteers, and the McGill sample. CBC does not report a before-and-after test of the 300 students.