Getting Silly

Getting Silly:
Via United Way of King County

Measuring preschoolers’ progress can involve many variables. Volunteer Reader Arie Whitman “measures” one thing: excitement! At the beginning of the school year at Olympic Hills Elementary Head Start, books and reading are new and can cause some anxiety; but by the third or fourth week of school, the children are tumbling over each other to read with Arie!
Arie incorporates activities that teach basic skills into reading time such as naming letters, rhyming, and counting; but best of all, Arie gets silly! When the wife in Goodnight Gorilla wakes up shocked to see animals crowding her bedroom, Arie and the kids practice their “surprised” faces! Arie also wears “elegant” costumes while reading; she describes one student, who, despite being a macho little guy, loves to read while wearing a pink feather boa wound around his neck as well as Arie’s!

By making reading time so enjoyable, Arie hopes to instill a love of books and reading. The children likely are unaware of how much they are learning while having fun, but Arie is: she sees how much they benefit from one-on-one attention, so she maintains a rule of reading to one child at a time, and turns that child’s chair away from the classroom to minimize distraction. Arie states, “You just know that once they leave Head Start and go into kindergarten they are going to have a clue about what books are about…and that letters mean something, and they’re learning those letters…you can see the wheels turning.”