Becca’s Reading Heroes Volunteer Story – “I just go in and say, ‘I’m your reading friend.’”

Reading Heroes matches volunteers to read with care experienced children and young people in order to spark a life long love of reading and to help improve the children’s confidence and well being.  We read with children in foster care, in kinship care with extended family and those who are being supported by Early Help teams who are aiming to keep families together.

With the number of care experienced children in the UK growing and the research telling us that they are more at risk of social, emotional and mental health problems, Reading Heroes is a more important project than ever.

Becca has been reading in person with two seven-year-old brothers. She reads separately with each boy. Helen, their foster carer, says that the older brother was diagnosed with dyslexia last year, and that Becca’s visits have made a difference to the boy’s confidence.

Helen: He wouldn’t read because he felt as if he was getting it wrong. In the past, if I’d say, ‘Go and pick a book,’ he’d pick a very ‘young’ book where he knew the words and could tell what it said by the pictures. Now, he’s picking ‘older’ books – not necessarily up to his age level, but more difficult to read – he’s wanting to try to read them. He’s suddenly interested: he’s discovered books. He takes his interests into school and he talks about different books he’s read. He’s wanting now to share with other people, which he didn’t at first, he really didn’t. I’ve got a little girl of two and he’s started reading bits to her – he used to totally shy away from that. So it’s taken his fear out of reading.

Becca: He wants to sit right next to me now. That started after a few months of reading together. He moved closer and closer so now we hold the book between us.

Helen: He is quiet. He takes his time to get to know you and only when he’s comfortable will he then come a bit closer. It is now 15 years since The Reader first started providing dedicated reading opportunities for looked-after children.

Feedback from the project has been overwhelmingly positive. One carer responding to a questionnaire sent out by the Virtual School commented: ‘They wake up every Thursday morning and say, “The Reader is coming today: great!” Another carer said that the time spent with a Reading Heroes volunteer ‘has played a huge part in how much the children have adapted to the changes that have been made in their lives both physically but more so emotionally. It has helped to give them the right to be carefree; a right that every child deserves.’ I spoke to several volunteers and carers currently participating in the project to find out how particular children have benefited. Becca describes how the younger brother she reads with is a more competent reader, but was initially more reluctant to engage in the sessions.

Becca: He’d rather be off doing something else. But once you can engage him, he does get into it. He really liked a lot of the Dr Seuss rhyming books with unusual words, like The Sneetches or Green Eggs and Ham. Through those books we discovered actually he loves books with rhymes in. He’ll pick out words that rhyme, and say something like: “Where” and “there” – they match!’

Helen: To be honest, we would never have discovered that without Becca coming, because he doesn’t read those sorts of books in school. He has set reading books, and we tend to buy factual books, like if he’s doing dinosaurs at school, something like that. Whereas we’ve now discovered that he loves poems, and rhyming stories and books. If he’s in his bedroom, he’s always reading those books – he loves them. Becca works in housing for the council, and comments that her job isn’t connected in any way to reading or to children. Her own son, with whom she enjoyed reading, is now a teenager.

Becca: With Reading Heroes, I’m an adult but I’m not in a position of authority. I just go in and say, ‘I’m your reading friend. I’m Becca.’ After we’ve done some reading I might say, ‘Shall we do a little game?’ Then it’s just a fun half-hour session. Reading is the bulk of it, but the boys don’t think, ‘Oh, she’s coming to just read and if I don’t want to do reading then that’s it, she’s going to go away.’ There’s always something else.

Helen: Being two boys, they’re very much in competition with each other for my attention. So they absolutely love someone else coming in and spending that time with them, and reading with them. Prior to this, the boys struggled to sit and listen, especially if there was someone new coming into the house. They would be very, very excitable, running around, hiding, and stuff like that. With Becca, they settle down, they speak, they listen and they enjoy it. Also the reading is very calming. The younger boy sometimes gets very frustrated, and Becca’s very good at calming him down.

Becca: Sometimes if we get to what they class as a good bit in a story they’ll say, ‘Can we go and show Helen?’ and they’ll jump off the sofa and go with the book and say, ‘Helen, look at what Becca’s just shown us.’ And then they come back again, and we carry on reading.

This is an extract from an article which first appeared in issue 76 of The Reader Magazine.