My own book

by Susan Anderson
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 9:29 AM MDT

I don’t know how it happened, but I had forgotten a few of the best things about first-graders.

I was reminded about them again when I had the opportunity to read to three groups of youngsters at this year’s Wyoming Reads event. This is a nearly all-day party for kids, with the goal of celebrating reading.

Each first-grader in our school district receives a high-quality hardcover book of his or her own, chosen by them from a list of six.

I forgot:

About the missing teeth and gap-toothed smiles.

How happy they are to make noise. It was no problem to get them to shout out “Yippee-o-ki-yeee!” at the appropriate place as I read from “There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea."

How unjaded they are. The 50 that I met were thrilled to see their own names written inside the books that they were given.

When I picked up a child’s book and read his or her name on the nameplate, each one looked like Christmas had just arrived.

It must have seemed very mysterious that the books had their names -- a miracle on the order of Santa Claus knowing if they were naughty or nice. They were very impressed with that, opening their books up again and again just to see their own names spelled out in print.

A growing event

If you stumbled upon the annual event that started as “Casper Cares, Casper Reads,” you would be startled at the magnitude of the scene.

Every first-grader in Natrona County n 954 of them -- took a bus or walked to the Nicolaysen Art Museum and the library on a sunny May 20. The street in front of the NIC was completely filled with school buses and closed to other, more mundane traffic.

In little groups scattered on the lawn were throngs of kids accompanied by teachers displaying various degrees of stress over herding their particular group of cats.

This is all organized with military-like precision in the 10th year of the event that John Jorgensen started to help teach Casper kids to love reading. He created this unique program in memory of his late wife and beloved Casper teacher of teachers, Sue Jorgensen.

Having watched John talk about creating this program in 1999, it is impressive to see how one person’s idea has grown.

If you were to Google the Sue Jorgensen book program, you would find descriptions of the same special day for first graders in all 23 Wyoming counties, Eden Prairie, Minn., and three towns in Oregon -- Klamath Falls, Springfield and Corvallis.

Rotary clubs in the other states learned of the Casper Cares program that began with Rotary Club support here, and knew a good idea when they saw it.

“My Book Day”

So, back to those first graders that I read to in three groups.

They didn’t know that they were part of a large and growing program. They just knew that, for reasons they didn’t totally understand, they were invited to lunch and to receive their own gift, for some the first and only book they have ever owned.

Not one child seemed tuned out of the event. Each shouted out that they wanted the “Celebrity Reader” to read their book. And after the reading, they carefully put the books back in their bags to take home.

The major problem was that once they discovered their own book in the bag, it was tough to get them to put it down for a moment to listen to the reading.

It was a little jarring to hear the teachers say, “Now put that book away!” They just wanted to look at their own gifts -- books of their very own that came to them from the bright idea of one imaginative Casper resident.

Just this week, I was reading another study about how reading to very small children sets them up well for learning. Just learning to turn pages and follow the story are good tools.

The article concluded that if parents heard there was a pill that would work the wonders for their children that early reading does, they would line up to buy it.

Thanks to John Jorgensen’s idea, thousands of children each year get access to that magic pill involving a book of their own and a push in the direction of reading.

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