Here is Rebecca Christian's first hand account of volunteering with Everybody Wins! Iowa
There are endless worthwhile reasons to read aloud with a child—it enhances speech and language development, improves vocabulary and pronunciation, provides tools for acquiring knowledge, promotes bonding with a caring adult, and leads to a lifelong love of learning. Yet I confess I do not do it for any of those reasons. My motivation for volunteering in a literacy program for the last seven years can be summed up in a single word: pleasure. I love the sound of a page turning, the sight of a grubby little forefinger tracing a word on a page, the light in the eyes of a child for whom the once elusive letters, meaning and context all start to whir and click at once.
The nonprofit program in which I volunteer is a national one with an Iowa chapter, Everybody Wins! Its concept is one of elegant simplicity: Once a week an adult goes to an elementary school to have lunch and read with a student partner. That’s it. It takes an hour and can be done on a lunch break from work. Sometimes the kids take part in the program because they’re struggling readers, sometimes because they are learning English, sometimes because they need a little TLC. I’ve read with three children so far and I’ve never asked the coordinator why they’re in the program. If they want to read enough to give up recess – no small thing for a third-grade boy! -- that’s good enough for me.
My first reader was Jordan, whom I thought of as Joe Friday because he loved a series of books of just the facts about the states—their flowers, their resources, their birds, their landmarks, their songs. Try as I might to get him fired up about Pa fording the creek in the Little House series or Horton rescuing the Whos, he preferred “real stories.” Jordan had been taught lovely manners, and when he had to read to me aloud about Nevada’s Hoover Dam, he giggled in embarrassment. This lead to a teachable moment with me explaining the difference between “dam” and “damn” while both of us rocked with laughter.
My second reader was Maggie with the flashing brown eyes, who said hi to everybody in the lunch room. (You can have school lunch with your reader, which he or she will love, but if you find tater tots resistible, you can bring your own.) Maggie was wonderful with voices, whether she was reading aloud as Dobby, the obsequious house elf in the Harry Potter books, or the disdainful retired magician in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. I always told her she belonged on Broadway. It was a privilege to see both Jordan and Maggie grow not just as readers, but as people, from third to fifth grade. This year I read with Vanessa, who seldom smiles or speaks above a whisper, but who comes shyly to life when we read The Boxcar Children. I see a significant increase in her fluency just since Christmas break. Although Everybody Wins! may be only one of many reasons for this, you can see why schools support this program: It increases literacy without increasing administrative costs.
The program keeps the focus on reading and makes children safe by requiring background checks on volunteers and prohibiting mentors from giving students gifts or contacting them outside of school. In Iowa, it boasts 300 volunteers in 13 schools, but there are still many children waiting for a mentor. If you would like to give the program a whirl, go to everybodywinsiowa.org. You’ll find it gives new meaning to the words of C.S. Lewis, who wrote the beloved children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia: “We read to know we are not alone.”
My first reader was Jordan, whom I thought of as Joe Friday because he loved a series of books of just the facts about the states—their flowers, their resources, their birds, their landmarks, their songs. Try as I might to get him fired up about Pa fording the creek in the Little House series or Horton rescuing the Whos, he preferred “real stories.” Jordan had been taught lovely manners, and when he had to read to me aloud about Nevada’s Hoover Dam, he giggled in embarrassment. This lead to a teachable moment with me explaining the difference between “dam” and “damn” while both of us rocked with laughter.
My second reader was Maggie with the flashing brown eyes, who said hi to everybody in the lunch room. (You can have school lunch with your reader, which he or she will love, but if you find tater tots resistible, you can bring your own.) Maggie was wonderful with voices, whether she was reading aloud as Dobby, the obsequious house elf in the Harry Potter books, or the disdainful retired magician in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. I always told her she belonged on Broadway. It was a privilege to see both Jordan and Maggie grow not just as readers, but as people, from third to fifth grade. This year I read with Vanessa, who seldom smiles or speaks above a whisper, but who comes shyly to life when we read The Boxcar Children. I see a significant increase in her fluency just since Christmas break. Although Everybody Wins! may be only one of many reasons for this, you can see why schools support this program: It increases literacy without increasing administrative costs.
The program keeps the focus on reading and makes children safe by requiring background checks on volunteers and prohibiting mentors from giving students gifts or contacting them outside of school. In Iowa, it boasts 300 volunteers in 13 schools, but there are still many children waiting for a mentor. If you would like to give the program a whirl, go to everybodywinsiowa.org. You’ll find it gives new meaning to the words of C.S. Lewis, who wrote the beloved children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia: “We read to know we are not alone.”
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