Volunteer Central of Greater Tulsa

3708 Southwest Blvd.

Tulsa, OK 74107
918 447-1888

Member of the Points of Light Foundation and Volunteer Center National Network

“The problem is that we have concentrated exclusively on teaching children how to read, and we have forgotten to teach them to want to read. There is the key: desire. It is the prime mover, the magic ingredient.”
-- Jim Trelease, The New Read-Aloud Handbook

As of April 2007, Read Now! became a program of the Child Care Resource Center. Please visit their website at www.ccrctulsa.org for more information.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, preschool-aged children are getting excited about reading thanks to adult and youth volunteers who share their passion for books on a weekly basis as part of Read Now!

Read Now! is a simple program with a big impact. Its mission is to promote a lifelong love of reading in the children of Tulsa. It does this by recruiting adult and youth volunteers to read books for one hour a week one-to-one with children in area child care centers in lower-income and culturally diverse neighborhoods. The goal is to help the children develop a love of books and enhance their school age literacy. Volunteers typically read with two children, infancy through age six, for 30 minutes each. The volunteer readers focus on word identification, reading fluency, word comprehension, and identifying numbers, shapes, and colors. In addition to having their own reading mentor, children in the program also receive one book a month to keep and to take home, which encourages parents and children to read at home.

During the past four years Read Now! has recruited more than 1,012 volunteers to read with more than 2,170 children, these volunteers gave a total of 11,798 hours during these four years. During this period, Read Now! has given away more than 16,132 books and magazines to children and more than 9,200 books and magazines to parents.

HISTORY
The program was developed in response to research that shows nearly 40 percent of fourth graders cannot read at grade level (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1998). A two-year evaluation of a similar program in Oregon called SMART (Start Making a Reader Today), which focused on elementary school children, showed that students made significant gains in word identification, reading fluency, and word comprehension.

Read Now! is funded by local Tulsa foundations and the Corporation for National Service (AmeriCorps*VISTA). Along with additional corporate or individual funding, volunteers, and new or gently-used books are needed to expand Read Now! across Tulsa and into outlying communities. With the community’s support, Tulsa’s children will start school ready to learn and will become avid readers themselves.