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Book Mentoring at Head Start
Four-year-old Jayonna Hughes grabs a book out of a small pile on her living room couch and takes it to her mother. "Mommy, can you read this to me?" she asks.
It's the pivotal moment in a chain of events begun by the WILL book mentoring project, one of the services of the Young Learners Initiative. Jayonna's mother pulls her daughter on her lap and begins reading, with Jayonna adding her own variations and jumping up to act out the hopping, bopping and slithering animals in the book, "Bearobics." The genesis of this important family interaction was WILL's monthly book mentoring session in Jayonna's Head Start classroom.
A volunteer from the Junior League had read the same book to Jayonna's class at school, after the kids watched a related PBS Kids video. Then she put on some music, gave each child a colorful scarf, and soon the classroom carpet was filled with twirling youngsters creating their own dances.
At the end of the day, each child in the class took home the scarf and a copy of the book with an activity sheet. Perhaps most importantly, their teachers encouraged the children to have an adult at their house read the book to them again and again.
And, said Jayonna's teacher Anita Rhodes, the encouragement works. "Boy, those kids don't forget! I've had parents tell me that this project really extended the amount of reading time at their house."
Putting books into the hands of families who otherwise might not have access to books at home is of crucial importance, said Amy Hayden of Head Start. "Children like repetition. If they have a favorite book at home, or a handful, the child eventually memorizes the book, and realizes that print has meaning."
For more YLI stories, click one of these links.
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