Twelve Northwestern students participated Thursday in Jumpstart’s Read for the Record, a national campaign to break the world record for the number of children reading the same book on the same day.
Along with group and individual reading sessions, kids participated in book-related games and crafts including creating sock puppets, pinning the ‘doll on the llama,’ and matching words that rhyme. The activities were based off of “Llama Llama Red Pajama” by Anna Dewdney.
Heidi Gross, site manager of NU’s Jumpstart program, said in an email the organization hopes to break last year’s record and have over 2.1 million children read the book.
Interacting with the college students is the best part of the event, said Evanston resident Stephanie Probst, who brought her 6-year-old son and two of his school friends to the event.
“It provides a good role model,” Probst said. “It shows that reading isn’t just something that they do at bedtime with Mommy and Daddy. They get another perspective and another voice that shows that the love of reading extends past their household.”
The Evanston event was just one component of a larger nationwide initiative organized by Jumpstart, a nonprofit group that targets early childhood education.
Jumpstart partners with 69 colleges and universities across the country as well as some community groups in an effort to equally prepare every child in America for kindergarten.
At NU, Jumpstart employs a core team of 35 NU students to work with two schools in Rogers Park and one school in Evanston. About 130 additional students contribute as volunteers.
“We try to address the issue that there is a huge inequality in the education system,” said Weinberg senior Todd Levine, who clocks in about 10 hours in the Evanston classroom per week. “Jumpstart tries to get to the kids before they get to kindergarten so these kids, who for whatever reason might not have the same advantages as others, will be on a level playing field.”
Gross said poverty has a lot to do with the achievement gap.
“In middle-income communities, children have an average of 13 books each, and in lower-income communities, there might only be one book for every 300 children,” she said. “The only chance to be exposed to books or reading or literacy is at school.”
Expanding the ways kids can access books is one of the goals of the Read for the Record event.
This year’s book incorporates many of the building blocks for emergent literacy.
“There is a lot of rhyming,” Gross said. “This is part of phonemic awareness and it provides a good touch point for children getting used to reading and how words are constructed. The narrative flow of the story is also something that a lot of children can relate to, so that also makes it a fun book.”
At the national level, Jumpstart serves classrooms where at least 75 percent of the students enrolled live below the poverty line.
The population of the Evanston school Jumpstart works with is primarily black. The schools in Rogers Park include Latinos, blacks and recent African immigrants.
Although Jumpstart works with one low-income school in Evanston, most of the parents at the event said they had not heard of the program.
“Part of the goal of this event is to raise awareness about the early childhood literacy problem in this country,” Gross said. “It’s not so much about us as an organization – we’re not trying to promote ourselves because we already have relationships with schools – it’s more like an awareness level of the issue itself.”
