A medical waiting room is an unsettling place for kids. All the cheery nurses and cartoon murals in the world can’t quite undercut the looming prospect of needles and strange implements.
Karen Damon is helping remedy that — and delivering some education, to boot.
Each Friday at 1 p.m., the retired schoolteacher lugs a tub of books into the Rocky Mountain Youth Clinic in Aurora. And for the next two hours, she reads books to the waiting young people. She uses plush toys to engage toddlers, helps 5-year-olds sound out words and has older kids read to her.
“The key here is to give children a head start on literacy,” said Damon, who today will be honored as Rocky Mountain Youth’s first volunteer of the year award. “It’s so much fun to come here and read to everyone from babies to elementary-school students.”
By Damon’s reckoning, a child of two parents with a middle income is read to for 1,000 hours before entering first grade. Low-income kids average closer to 25 hours.
“The kids come in, and I read to them in the waiting room before they’re called in for their appointments,” said Damon, who reads to a rotating group totaling 20 kids on any given Friday. “Maybe I only have 10 minutes with them, but I still feel I’ve contributed to those thousand hours.”
Damon arrived in Colorado in 2007 to be an “in-town grandmom” to her grandchildren. She had lived in Beaverton, Ore., where she taught kindergarten and first grade. She was also involved with the SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) program, an effort at jump-starting literacy among children.
She wanted to continue working with kids, so she contacted Reach Out and Read Colorado, which connected her with the clinic.
“When you read to babies, it helps forge structures in their brain to learn languages,” Damon said.
Because many clinic patients are Hispanic, Damon is learning Spanish. “I want to be able to say ‘cow’ and ‘kitty’ and ‘dog’ in Spanish,” she said.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Damon pulled a copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” from her book tub.
Erik Casillas, 8, and his sister, 5-year-old Elizabeth, sat rapt as Damon recounted the multilegged critter’s adventures. Erik helped Damon with the reading, slowly going over the sentences. Their mom, Luz, watched.
“My son is in third grade, but his teachers say he reads at a first-grade level,” said Casillas, who arrived from Mexico 11 years ago. “So this is good.”
Alfie Meister, a pediatrician at the clinic, agrees.
“I tell the parents of my patients that beyond getting their children vaccinations, the most important thing they’ll do for them is read to them for 10 minutes every night,” Meister said.
Damon recently bought 100 used books from the Aurora Public Library, donating them to the clinic. Children ages 6 months to 5 years who come for a checkup get a book.
“A lot of our families struggle to put food on the table, let alone put a book in the hands of their children,” said Jill Friedentag Fishman, the clinic’s community and volunteer-relations manager.
Which is where Damon comes in. “It’s very rewarding for me to do that,” she said.
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
Interested in volunteering?
Rocky Mountain Youth: Contact Jill Friedentag Fishman at jill@rocky or 720-343-1785.Reach Out and Read Colorado: reachoutand
