Growing Readers: Because Kids Matter
Guest Blogger: Patti Gibbons
Reading with children is an amazing way to communicate love to them. That is the motivation, born of times spent being read to in my own childhood as well as reading to my own little ones, that caused me to introduce a pile of favorite storybooks to the free-choice activities at The Breakfast Club, a Saturday morning ministry for inner city children. We had been seeking highly-relational activities that allowed for conversation, appropriate non-verbal communication, and the opportunity to make memories with children whose home lives lacked attentive adults or positive, life-giving experiences. The effect of reading books together was more powerful than ever anticipated.
There are many cozy times with favorite books my own children can recall with me, but I’d always thought that was as much a function of frequency as anything else. It wasn’t until I was at a conference for high school students and saw (actually, was ambushed by a tackle-style hug from) a former Breakfast Club kid there with a youth group, that I knew the real value of those reading times with her years before. I discovered that we’d missed the real priceless commodity in simple activity of reading with these children. Yes, all of the good things we hoped to convey by reading with them happened and relationships grew and lives were shared across all sorts of improbably-crossed lines. But it became far more than we’d hoped as the relational impact we’d sought through reading together deepened and became a vehicle for the children’s improved confidence in speaking to adults, in reading aloud, in sharing achievements from school. That time reading made a real and significant difference in these young lives. As time went by and those children became middle and high school age, we learned that time and attention, those precious reading corner moments of connection, were whole life investments. Pretty fantastic, though unanticipated, return on such a simple investment that so many might take for granted.
March 21st, 2008 at 5:24 pm
It communicates so much when you are willing to take the time to read to a child!
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Time to read, listen, talk to, give encouragement… creating the environment where these kids could know their worth in their Creator’s eyes by the love of the volunteers, that’s what the Breakfast Club was all about.
I just heard the saddest news today, the BC is being scaled back dramatically, with an eye toward discontinuing it. Breaks my heart to see that happen after about 10 years of investment in it in the same neighborhood; so many changed lives.