A college student finds connection through his love of reading while mentoring a New York City elementary school student as part of the Read Ahead literacy program.
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SLJ modified: jadamprostore/Getty Images |
During the COVID-19 quarantine, as a high school 10th grader, I made a half-hearted New Year’s resolution to read more. I didn’t quantify my goal or create guidelines for it, but I developed a reading obsession, piling books on my bedroom floor and reading late into the night. I realized that reading wasn’t just a hobby. Reading made me more curious about my own surroundings. It made me more eager to learn, and I understood people faster. When I applied to college, I made sure to choose schools with strong literature and humanities programs. I was accepted to Columbia University and am now studying English there.
Transitioning to school was a big change—even though I lived just 45 minutes away in New Jersey, my hometown seemed a world away from New York City. Unsure how to break into the city’s society, which seemed vast and unfathomable, I looked for ways to connect with real New Yorkers, using my love of literature as a means of connecting. I found Read Ahead—a New York-based nonprofit that pairs volunteer mentors with elementary school students to improve their reading skills. Read Ahead partners with Columbia and businesses and organizations across the city to find mentors. Founded in 1991, Read Ahead matches mentors with about 1,000 children in grades 1-5 each year.
After a thorough application process, I was accepted as a mentor. Before we started with the students, they were explained through an online training process that literacy and social-emotional learning (SEL) were the two main pillars of the program. The mentors would help them with pronouncing and reading words and help them understand the meaning of the words and their importance to the story. Through SEL, we should focus on students’ relationship skills and self-awareness.
After completing my training, I became a reading mentor for a fourth-grader at Public School 125, just nine blocks from my on-campus dorm. Each week, my nine-year-old mentee would participate in an hour-long Zoom call with me or my mentor partner, who I rotated with for weeks at a time throughout the year. Zoom calls have been common at Read Ahead since the pandemic began, but they began adding optional in-person mentoring sessions to the schedule.
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Caroline Nieto |
When I first met my mentee, I sensed that this type of communication intimidated him. Having been shy myself as a child, I could tell that he was not listless, but introverted. I wanted to be as responsive to his learning style as possible, because the relationship he developed with reading at this age would influence the rest of his reading career. We had access to Epic, a digital reading program with over 40,000 children’s books for all reading levels. Using this platform, my mentee and I chose what we wanted to read during each session.
I asked him if he had any hobbies or interests he would like to read about, but he was reluctant to answer. Instead, I gave him specific concepts or titles I found on the website. He became interested when I described a mystery book to him. We chose one about a missing turtle in an elementary school classroom because reading about familiar settings always helped me identify with books.
I usually start by reading a few pages out loud, then let my mentee take his turn once he knows the structure of the book. After about every page, I pause and ask him about unfamiliar words, and if he doesn’t know what they mean, I give him a simple explanation. For difficult words, I let him say them out loud, then give him help if he can’t get them right after several tries. After a few pages, I ask him if he wants to read on, and he always says yes. It took some encouragement to get him to read confidently, but his interest in the stories always helps him keep going.
I wanted to show my student that there was more to reading than the technical aspects of sounding out words. I wanted to show him the joy of reading, so I also asked him about the events in the story and whether he could relate to them. I noticed that if he had learned about a topic in school, he was quicker to answer my questions about specific words or plot elements. In our book, which took place in elementary school, there were bullies, so we discussed the characters’ behavior and what they could do differently to avoid fights with other children.
While Read Ahead’s primary mission is to promote literacy, the program also aims to complement a comprehensive education. Before each session, the program director would email mentors additional resources we could use for the week, often tailored to a specific season or holiday. In the winter, we were given holiday quizzes, word search puzzles, and “Would You Rather” matching games. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, my mentee and I read a picture book about King’s work in the American civil rights movement. I was surprised that he already knew a lot about King from what he had learned in school. When we did a crossword puzzle on the topic, he knew almost all of the answers and answered quickly and enthusiastically. I was glad that Read Ahead promoted teaching about these historical events because some of the important activist and artist movements in New York City took place right in Harlem, where my mentee went to school.
The impact of Read Ahead goes beyond just reading practice – connecting with other students, learning about history and improving communication are all part of the experience.
In the coming school year, I would like to return to Read Ahead as a mentor. I will be able to connect with new students, possibly from a new school, and hopefully attend some events in person. Read Ahead has allowed me to put my education into a bigger perspective and taken me back to the basics of why I am still studying, especially literature. It has been so rewarding to see my own love of reading reflected in another person. Sparking that interest is the greatest feeling in the world and can be life-changing for a child.
