3 Rs: Reading, Reading and Reading : * Education: Teacher invites parents to the classroom to share their favorite books with kindergartners.

Lynn Cherkasky-Davis prefers that visitors to her kindergarten classroom not come empty-handed.

The award-winning teacher asks visiting adults to bring their favorite children’s book and read it to the class.

The burgeoning library in Room 2 at Dumas Elementary School is partly the result of Cherkasky-Davis’ visitor-reading program. She lets readers know that a book donation would be welcome.

“You never get more than you ask for,” she says. “As long as it involves my kids, I ask.”

Books are the currency of instruction in Cherkasky-Davis’ class. Her kindergartners all read at some level, and they write and illustrate books. The school day begins and ends with reading, and every student chooses a book to take home for a bedtime story.

“There’s never an excuse for them not to hear a bedtime story,” Cherkasky-Davis says. Visitors are videotaped reading their books, and the class also has a collection of books on audiocassettes. Students who don’t have anyone to read to them can check out a video or tape to take home with the book.

“Some of my parents are literate; some are not,” Cherkasky-Davis says, noting that a number of the mothers are teen-agers and that some of her students are being raised by their grandmothers or other relatives.

Dumas Elementary School sits amid abandoned, burned-out buildings in Woodlawn, a tough inner-city district on the South Side.

Cherkasky-Davis, a 20-year veteran teacher, has taught in Chicago public schools since 1979 and at Dumas Elementary for two years. She’s been robbed five times, once at gunpoint, and had the battery stolen from her car--all while teaching at Chicago schools other than Dumas.

She’s determined to teach in the inner city. “It’s where I want to be,” she says. “I absolutely believe that this is what I need to do.”

Although she’s aware that many parents here are struggling under the strains of poverty, Cherkasky-Davis makes no excuses for them. “I expect a lot of my parents,” she says. “I expect them to be a partner.” Many of the parents, even those who were skeptical at first, volunteer their time in the classroom.

Every student in Cherkasky-Davis’ class is required to have a public library card. In past years, she took the class to the library to get the cards. But, she says, “my philosophy has evolved. Now, I want to make their parents get involved. I will give the parents bus fare or take them to the library. But they must do it.”

In Cherkasky-Davis’ classroom, everybody participates to the fullest extent possible. When students arrive in the morning, they take their own attendance by moving their laminated name tags, which they wrote themselves the first day of school, from one part of the bulletin board to another.

Cherkasky-Davis breaks all the rules when it comes to classroom design. She doesn’t have a chalkboard, just bulletin boards chock-full of material. “All of the bulletin boards are done with the help of the kids,” she points out. “I know it’s kind of junky, but it’s their work.”

On one wall, commendations for the students are displayed along side Cherkasky-Davis’ many plaques and awards.

You won’t see desks lined up in a row in this class: There aren’t any desks, not even for the teacher. “I don’t have room for a desk,” Cherkasky-Davis says, pointing to a small table in the corner loaded with her papers.

Research materials line the walls. When asked a question, the students can almost always find the answer somewhere in the room.

“I’m a last resort (for answering questions),” Cherkasky-Davis says. The rule is “Ask three before me.” The students end up learning from each other as much as from the teacher. “I don’t want them to think the teacher is a magical person,” she says.

Workbooks and work sheets don’t have any place in the curriculum here. “I want the curriculum to come from the children,” Cherkasky-Davis says. All of her lessons are based on real life.

Sylvia Peters, principal at Dumas, says Cherkasky-Davis “brings the real world inside so there’s some connection between the place called ‘school’ and the world. I see the work that Lynn does as the beginning of the creative process for little people.”