A Ticket to a Magical Summer Getaway

While many teachers found themselves yawning over the familiar back-to-school essays about summer trips to Disneyland or the beach, some local educators found themselves happily transported to far less predictable territory--in Narnia and Diagon Alley.

You won’t find these magical locales on any maps, though. They inhabit the books of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, respectively, just two of the many authors the Geneva Street Reading Club explored this summer.

The neighborhood reading group, established four years ago by two Glendale mothers and their children, is not affiliated with a particular library, nor is it a high-pressure program designed to catapult children to the head of the class.

“We’re just a group of families trying to encourage our kids and praise them for reading,” said Effie Block, one of the group’s founding parents. “We’re advocates of literacy and we enjoy reading. We know it opens up so much for them.”

Anoush Kazarians, 9, who has been with the group three years, said she participates, in part, because she likes to share her love of reading with others.

“When I read, I get to unravel mysteries and travel to new places,” the Glendale fourth-grader said. “And then I get to tell other people all about it.”

The Geneva Street Reading Club--named after the Glendale street on which several of the participants live--began four summers ago, when Cris Watson’s daughter, Marian, and Block’s son, Calder--both 6 at the time--announced that they wanted to start a club.

Watson, knowing that the friends shared a love of literature, suggested a reading club, and promised to give them each a trophy if they read 100 picture books that summer. The pair easily reached that goal, as did the six or so other neighborhood kids who decided to give it a try.

“I like to challenge myself to read as much as I can, especially new authors,” said 10-year-old Marian, who knocked off an impressive 3,950 pages this summer.

The reading group, which began with only the handful of neighborhood children, now boasts a roster of about 30, ages 3 to 23, from Glendale, Pasadena, Eagle Rock, Marina del Rey, Simi Valley and even Tennessee.

Block advertised the club through neighborhood fliers she printed and by publishing an article about it in her children’s school newspaper. She also sent notices to friends and relatives who live out of town.

The club requirements are simple: Pre-readers agree to have their parents read 100 stories to them over the three-month vacation; beginning readers, ages 5 to 7, agree to read 100 short picture books; and the older children commit to reading 1,000 pages from novels, biographies or any other books of their choosing.

“Let’s face it. The great problems in life are played out in literature,” said Watson, a second-grade teacher at Walt Disney Elementary School in Burbank. “When parents read to their kids, the parents become moral all over again. The kids get a boost too.”

In more ways than one. Virginia Walter, an information studies professor and children’s literature expert at UCLA, believes that the primary value of children’s reading clubs is that they lend an element of social interaction to what normally is a solitary experience.

“For 9- to 12-year-olds in particular, when organized group activities become so important, if you don’t get the social element into a club, with their rituals and rules, the kids usually drop out,” she said. “By adding the social element to reading, it brings the kids in.”

An additional benefit of reading clubs, Walter said, is that neighborhood involvement in reading communicates to children that the activity is important, not just because their teacher or parents say it is, but because everyone in their circle thinks it is.

Seventeen of the Geneva Street club members and their parents celebrated their summer reading achievements this month at a pool party in Pasadena, where the participants received awards and shared their favorite book titles.

Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was the most mentioned book among the older children, while Mary Pope Osborne’s “Magic Tree House” series appealed to the younger readers. Roald Dahl, whose quirky books feature children who outwit the terrible adults in their lives, was popular among all ages.

Although the children clearly loved receiving their trophies, they were nearly unanimous in saying that they would have read even without the incentive.

Walter said the children’s attitude about the trophies is just what it should be.

“Reading rewards are OK, but the danger is that some children will put the activity into the category of ‘it’s good for you,’ like getting a prize from the dentist after an exam,” she said. “We don’t want them associating reading with unpleasant activities that require rewards.”

Ann Connor, coordinator of children’s services for the Los Angeles Public Library, agreed. “We like to emphasize reading as its own reward. But whenever people support kids’ reading, in whatever format, that’s great.”

Sarah Wickham, 7, a Geneva Street club member from Eagle Rock, put it this way: “I like to read because I learn a lot. It makes me happy.”

* SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIVING

Children love the Harry Potter books about the wizard boy who attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft. They have nothing but good things to say in their reviews of two of the stories. E5