As third grader Zach Parker successfully read a passage from the children’s book "Mouse Soup," Dennis Lee, a point guard for South Lakes High School's basketball team grinned and nodded approvingly.
"He’s cool and he really enjoys reading," Lee said of his young apprentice last Thursday, Feb. 5, in the Terraset Elementary cafeteria, surrounded by his teammates who were also huddled over books with other young students.
Lee, along with the rest of the Seahawks basketball team, has become a reading tutor and a role model for a handful of Terraset students in the past few months.
THE TUTORING PROGRAM, called "Readers are Leaders," was developed in the fall by the team’s head coach, Wendell Byrd, as a way for the players to give back to the community.
"This is a way we can reach out and help," Byrd said. "It’s developing self esteem, not just in the younger students, but in the older students as well. It gives them a way to feel better about themselves."
The Terraset students, from grades two through six, were selected by their teachers in early November and have been meeting with the basketball players once a week since then. The younger students are given stickers, t-shirts, free books and other incentives to encourage them to get in the habit of reading, said Ava Wolfram, Terraset’s reading specialist who helps out with the program.
"The more they read, the better they get," she said. "This is a team effort and the kids love it."
The one-on-one reading sessions with the basketball players helps build up the students’ reading "fluency," Wolfram said, because as the younger students follow along, they begin to model themselves on how the players read.
Before the program began, the basketball players went through six hours of training to learn how to teach not only reading ability, but also reading comprehension, Wolfram said.
A grant from the Colburn Foundation, a local nonprofit organization, has made the program possible, while also making other activities possible, such as a recent trip to a George Mason University basketball game.
Also, at the end of the year, all of the program’s participants will get together with their families for a barbecue, Byrd said.
BECAUSE THE TUTORS are basketball players, the younger students respect them and want to gain their approval by reading well, said Ellen Cury, the principal of Terraset.
"The younger kids wait all week long for the older boys to come," she said. "The kids look up to the basketball players — they’re seen as special people. They get excited and they see that learning is an important life skill."
At last Thursday's tutoring session, as the murmur of quiet, one-on-one reading buzzed through the cafeteria, the program was making an impact, observed Lee, the point guard tutor.
"It feels like we’re making a tremendous difference," he said. "I like helping the younger people."