ROSSMOOR : Older Folks Bring Fun by the Book

Little hands competed for attention as Mary Delavegn started to check which of the bunch of books in front of her she would read first.

“Let’s do one on dinosaurs,” said a boy sitting on the floor.

“No, read that big book with the nice pictures,” countered a girl with a Mickey Mouse ribbon on her hair.

“I can read a book myself,” volunteered the girl in the white T-shirt.

Delavegn, 73, of Rossmoor put on a grandmotherly smile, then opened the book she picked herself: “The Ant and the Elephant.” The youngsters around her fell silent as she started to read.

Since May, grandparents reading books to children has been a pretty common sight at the Los Alamitos-Rossmoor Public Library, thanks to a state-funded program called “Grandparents and Books.

Delavegn is one of 18 volunteers who were trained how to choose books to share with the children and use such reading aids as puppets. She comes to the library on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, spending two hours each time. She reads to children who accompany their parents to the library or those who come in groups for reading sessions.

On a recent Wednesday, Delavegn read to a group of 7- to 12-year-olds on break from a summer day camp at Rossmoor Elementary School. A few tables away from her, two other volunteers, Maureen Bloom and Diane Kalfus, read to children from the same group.

“We all love children, and we all love to read,” said Delavegn, who has three grown grandchildren of her own. “I don’t have little ones around anymore, so this is fun.”

“Sometimes, the kids read to the grandparents,” said Toni Sawyer, the program coordinator. “This is a positive way of building relationships between children and older adults.”

A $5,000 grant from the state went to buy books and materials and to promote the program, Sawyer said. However, she said, she is not sure if the money will be available next year because of the recent cuts in library funding.

But for the moment, children love the program, said Bloom, 59. She said library officials should make the most of it.

“We want to get children hooked to reading early on,” said Bloom, who has five grandchildren. “When they become readers, they stay readers.”

The children said they enjoy being read to more than reading the book themselves.

“Adult people make it more exciting,” said 7-year-old Melissa Pirayoff of Cypress, a second-grader at Cawthon Elementary School. She said she reads a lot but somehow it’s better when someone like her grandmother reads to her.

Allison Shim, 8, a fourth-grader at Los Alamitos Elementary School, said she does not have a grandmother to read to her. Her only living grandparent, her mom’s mother, lives in Korea. “I read to myself because my 18-year-old sister is always busy,” she said, adding that her parents read to her sometimes.

Grandparents reading or telling stories to their grandchildren is a dying tradition, Delavegn said. She said she still remembers the mesmerizing stories her grandmother told her about the Civil War.

“She mostly told stories than read to me,” Delavegn said. “But she was a major influence in my life.”