He came hurtling toward her shouting, “Mrs. Book, Mrs. Book” when he saw her again in the fall. He was a four-year-old Headstart preschool student in the Chicago area, and she is a volunteer reader with the Chicagoland West chapter of Assistance League.
Their interaction typifies the nationwide relationships between students and volunteers in Assistance League literacy programs. She read to him last year and gave him books to take home and keep. He remembered both her face and the special time she spent with him encouraging him to love books.
With the realization that 4-in-10 children live in low income families in our country, and the understanding that reading skills are a vital key to ultimate school success, over half of the 120 Assistance League chapters across the country offer literacy and tutoring programs in schools with the lowest income students. Even more chapters provide new books for children to take home and keep for their own — these books usually go to homes with no other books.
Several chapters, including Conejo Valley and Los Gatos-Saratoga, provide students with paperback dictionaries to complement their growing reading skills. Twelve hundred third graders in Silicon Valley received new dictionaries along with a lesson on their use.
One-to-one tutoring is done daily across the nation by Assistance League volunteers sitting with wiggly kids trying to learn the alphabet, master the English language and bring their reading skills up to grade level. For example, 22 Chicagoland West member volunteers reached nearly 900 children in the last academic year.
Most of the chapter reading and tutoring programs are offered from preschool through the third grade level. Eighty-five percent of low income children can’t read proficiently even after attending school for at least three years, and Assistance League volunteers are dedicated to lowering that percentage one child at a time.
