ACE News
Community Volunteers Give Back to Young Readers
March 2010
Literacy Champions, an after-school reading tutoring program, began in 2005 as a collaboration between ACE and Austin Partners in Education to pilot successful community volunteer tutor models. ACE has operated the program at Allison Elementary School since its inception.
Literacy Champion tutors are community volunteers who provide one-on-one after-school reading tutoring for second-graders every week for 45 minutes. They are trained and supervised onsite by ACE Program Coordinator Susan Buchanan. The onsite support and ongoing training ensure a meaningful and successful tutoring experience for both the tutors and the children.
ACE has three goals for the Literacy Champions program: first, to provide positive literacy experiences for struggling readers by matching them with an ACE tutor; second, to encourage fluent reading and help students develop good reading comprehension strategies; and third, to enrich the literacy experiences of participating students by exposing them to books of interest to them and by nurturing their desire to read independently outside the school day.
Susan Buchanan has led Literacy Champions for the past two years and sees the improvements that the children are making first hand. “I believe there has been a difference in the children’s literacy skills,” she says. “For example, each child is researching an animal they are interested in learning more about. Each child generated a list of queries to investigate, and is working on reading and writing skills in the process.”