Are you looking for a good place to volunteer and help children develop a love for books and reading? Our neighbor to the north offers just the thing. For 15 years, volunteers like me have been reading to kindergarten and first and second grade students, one-on-one, in Richmond elementary schools—six of them at present count. Teachers select the students who participate. We readers meet with two students once a week for half-hour sessions right through the school year. Every two weeks, the students get a gift book of their choosing, the building blocks for personal libraries. The program is simplicity itself: a caring adult reads to a young person and they talk about what’s read and what the reading suggests to them about the world. You don’t have to be an expert to do it, just an enthusiastic book and reading person yourself. And don’t think of it as just feel-good work—although you certainly will be doing something worth feeling good about. It’s also great fun, and, for me, brought back memories of reading to my own daughters. I’m glad Marilyn Nye, my one-time colleague at Cal State East Bay, who created the program, talked me into joining the cadre
