In Greg Mortensen’s recent best seller, “Stones into Schools,” he tells many heart-warming stories about the project to build schools for the children of Afghanistan and how eager the villagers of the remote areas were to have their children learn to read.
Returning to the U.S. to raise money after an earthquake leveled hundreds of schools, Mortensen read “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak to his five-year-old son, tracing each sentence with his finger. He recalls, “My mind was so preoccupied with the issues on the other side of the planet…my reverie was derailed by the realization that my son had stopped listening to my voice and had begun to enunciate the words from memory. Kyber was reading for the first time in his life. When you are a parent, the instant your child begins to read for himself is a moment of the purest magic. It doesn’t matter whether you happen to live in Kasmir or Montana – witnessing the fire of literacy ignite in the mind of a child is something transcendent.”
“That evening offered the most succinct encapsulation of the blessings and the burdens that come out of the work that I do to promote literacy and education for the young readers in Central Asia.”
I have been a Read Aloud Delaware volunteer for over 25 years. I have read to 3 and 4-year-olds, but currently am reading once a week to 4s and 5s. They never fail to bring a little smile to my face and they smile, too, as they skip down the hall to the “reading room.”
The first time I met one five-year-old, she insisted that she wanted to read a book herself. She chose one and awed me as she rattled off two or three words on every page and invented the rest. When she finished, she looked at me with an impish grin and closed the book with a bang.
Someone had obviously read to her!
If you want to join the fun, call Read Aloud Delaware at 656-5256 or visit their website www.readalouddelaware.org for more information.
