The Greenwood Mentoring Group is embarking on a new program designed to get children and their parents or guardians into reading together.
The effort, known as Prime Time Family Reading Time, is a partnership between the mentoring group, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the Mississippi Humanities Council.
The free program will be held in 90-minute sessions beginning at 11 a.m. on Saturdays from Feb. 27 through April 2 at the mentoring center’s annex at 124 Ave. G. It is open to students from first through fourth grades, and lunch is included.
Nine of the original 15 slots for the program have been filled.
“It’s meant to engage the family. What we’re trying to do is provide information about how stories and books can be incorporated into the home,” said former state Rep. Linda Whittington, who is the program’s moderator.
“The child learns what’s important from their parents. So if the parents read and believe that it’s important to share these stories, it helps — especially in our neighborhood, where you want to expose them to as much literature as possible. It increases their vocabulary; it gives them confidence.”
Each day will begin with lunch, and then storyteller Robert Hitt Neill will come in and recreate themes from the books the children and their parents have been given to read.
“Each family, each week, will receive three books,” Whittington said. “The idea that during the course of that week the family reads the book together and the next Saturday the storyteller comes in and acts it out makes it fun.”
Whittington will ask basic questions as part of the discussion, to make sure the families understood the stories’ themes. The books are award- winning works for children.
Bill Clay, the mentoring group’s founder and chief executive officer, said the program is “one of the many things that we’ve done to reach out, to help educate the children in this area.”
The effort required some training, so two weeks ago Clay and Whittington attended a workshop in New Orleans from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. The Mississippi Humanities Council is supplying the books that will be used.
Whittington said Prime Time has been used for 20 years and has been implemented in 40 states. It has gotten results, she said.
“They have a study out that looked at it over those 20 years,” she said. “They can show that through this program engaging children and their families, literacy improves in the child’s life.”
It is an updated version of Family Bonds Reading program, which Whittington conducted as director of Communities In Schools.
“We started out with 10 families or so. Every year as we did it, the word got out and they would call us, ‘When is it? When is it? When is it?’” Whittington said. In the end, more than 25 families participated.
Although the Mississippi Humanities Council will only sponsor the program for a year, Whittington hopes a set of the books will be left at the Mentoring Center so that the center might engage the participants’ younger brothers and sisters over the summer.
Clay said Prime Time is another step by the mentoring group toward “reaching out and targeting children that are most in need in terms of learning.”
The implementation of the third-grade “reading gate,” in which children are held back if they are not reading at grade level, makes the program all the more important, he said.
“This is a step we’re taking on a small level to increase the awareness of the parents,” he said.
He said the program is not limited to families in Greenwood. He also hopes Greenwood restaurants will contribute, since lunch is part of it.
Clay said Prime Time is another milestone in the mentoring group’s commitment to service.
“We’re elated to bring something to the Greenwood area that is definitely going to increase the reading skills of the children and also to increase the enthusiasm of the parents to want their child to read,” he said.
For more information on enrolling in the Prime Time program, call the Greenwood Mentoring Center at 455-1195.
•Contact Bob Darden at 581-7239 or bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com.
