DATE: Friday, June 20, 1997                 TAG: 9706190421

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   49 lines

HEAD START ENCOURAGES PARENTS AND KIDS TO READ

Kathleen Wright wants to do something for her 4-year-old daughter, Aurora, that her parents didn't do for her:

Encourage her to read before she's in kindergarten.

What got Wright moving was a reading program at Head Start that allowed her to check books out from her daughter's Head Start center in Norfolk.

The books were purchased last fall with a $2,000 grant from the Ronald McDonald House, which was matched by a $2,000 grant from Golden Books.

The grants allowed the Southeastern Tidewater Opportunity Project, the organization that runs Head Start centers in South Hampton Roads, to purchase 3,000 books for its 82 centers.

Children at the centers can check out the books so their parents can read to them at home. The goal of the program is to encourage parents to read to their children.

Other companies, such as Pizza Hut, Lillian Vernon, Cinema Cafe and AT&T jumped into the reading campaign by offering free coupons for things like pizza, jewelry and movies, if parents read books to their children.

That's how Wright and several hundred other parents got started reading to their children in a big way. And now that the campaign is over for the school year, many of them are still reading.

Wright is making puppets and other items this summer to go along with some of the stories, so that the children will have learning aides for stories when a new reading campaign starts again in the fall.

While Wright had always read to her children, it was not an everyday activity until the reading campaign started.

Now, her daughter has a greater interest in reading.

``She's learning what the words look like and what letters look like,'' Wright said.

Another Head Start parent, Karen Brotherton, also racked up a long list of books she read to her 4-year-old, Cavin. The Norfolk resident had always been a big reader, going to public libraries with her children to check out stacks of books.

``I want them to be interested in reading,'' Brotherton said.

Head Start volunteer coordinator Ruth Hickman estimates that the parents collectively read more than 35,000 books in the span of a school year.

Those books are getting a bit frayed, so people who want to make a book donation to a Head Start center are asked to call Ruth Hickman at 858-1360, Ext. 317. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Kathleen Wright

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