Every Saturday, I wake up early. And by early, I mean early by my college-student-on-a-weekend standards, a.k.a. 11:15am. I take a short walk to the outer edge of campus, where I spend an hour with an adorable 5th grader named Alex.
From noon to 1 p.m. for the last year, I’ve been a tutor at New Haven Reads. The non-profit organization promotes literacy in New Haven youth, with a mission to get its tutees up to and beyond grade level reading. The free sessions involve an hour with a tutor (many of them Yale students), and the students leave with a new book each week.
My typical session with mini-Alex begins with about 20 minutes of Lexia, a computer program with interactive literacy activities. Then about 15 minutes of Explode the Code, a reading workbook series. Our last academic activity is 15 minutes of sight-reading, usually alternating every few pages. Alex’s favorite books are Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which we almost always end up reading. Confession time: I’m starting to develop a certain fondness for Greg Heffley and his friends. We end the session with a short game, usually Connect Four (once again, his favorite).
New Haven Reads offers me a great opportunity to venture outside the Yale bubble, give a little something back to the New Haven community and share my love of reading with a child. A bonus: permission to laugh at some 5th grade humor after a long week of political philosophy and microeconomics.
