Today we sat in on a meeting at the Jump Start offices. The meeting was with a few members of the Jump Start community and three college students. The college students, who taught in Jump Start programs across the city, were talking about their work with the organization and their personal experiences. Jump Start is an organization that works with kids in preschool in under funded and low income neighborhoods. Lots of the kids are English language learners, and without the help of Jump Start two hour a day lessons they would be years behind their peers in kindergarten. Setting them up for a failing education. One question was about a certain progress they might have seen in a kid they tutored their years with the program that really astounded them. One student said that he once taught a girl who only knew how to write her name upside down. He talked about how over the year he worked with her and showed her the strokes to all of the letters. When she finally did write her name he felt like his work had really paid off. Another student talked about how she noticed that one boy would never come to the writing station during activity time, and when he did he wouldn’t write. She talked to him one day and learned that he didn’t even know how to hold a pencil. She coached him and eventually he was writing. We learned also about something called the 30 million word gap. By age three, children in low income families will be exposed to 30 million fewer words than children in higher income. We learned that for a good, rewarding education, it is important that you instill a joy in learning early on in kids lives. If they are already falling behind their classmates in kindergarten, their not likely to be much higher in middle school. But with the help of organizations like JumpStart, they can be brought up to speed with their classmates and learn that learning can be fun and exciting.
