By Bethany Lewis | Organization Coordinator
We started working at Johnson Boys & Girls club in the fall of 2012. We couldn't believe then, and we still can't believe how many kids we have reading there! We consistently have about 15 kids on our Monday group - they decided they wanted to read some scary books for the summer, so we just started two new titles this week...so far they're pretty juicy and the kids are really into them. We also have our youngest group of readers at Johnson - so we started another group on Thursdays (10 kids, ages 6-9). They decided to read The BFG, by Roald Dahl, and we're on track to finish it this summer.
Johnson also has some super advanced kids who burn through literature faster than we can put it in their hands! There are about 5 of these kids in particular - and if they're not playing a sport, they have a book in their hands. It's so great and we are happy to provide books to these kids, who otherwise could never afford them.
Contrasting the advanced readers, Johnson has a lot of lower level readers, some of whom are just learning how to read English and chapter books, but we see improvement in them every single week and they persevere no matter what.
The best part about Johnson is the support these kids give each other. When the younger ones aren't sure about reading a book, the older ones tell them how great the book was and they are more motivated as a result. They all help each other when they're reading - I've seen adults with less patience than these kids! They have fun and help each other with word pronunciation and understanding the story.
What we now need for Johnson are more volunteers so that we can read more frequently with the less advanced readers. Volunteers have been increasingly hard to obtain as we are unable to compensate anyone for their time and effort at present. We've also had to delay or deny requests from kids for books because it's not in the budget. We've donated close to 70 brand new books to the kids and even more to the center, but to ensure that we have enough to fund all of our centers and kids, we are unable to fill a lot of requests.
We are excited about the future at Johnson, but there is much work to be done!
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