Getting a Jump-Start on School

Inside the “preschool lab” at Cleveland High School, senior Lizeth Orta is prepping a 4-year-old named Andrew for a lifetime of reading.

The lesson on this day is the letter H. Lizeth jots the symbol down on a piece of paper.

“What letter is this?” she asks.

Andrew shrugs.

Lizeth picks up an ink stamp displaying the same letter and asks, “What is this?”

“H,” Andrew says.

“OK, you’re learning.”

On this day, however, it isn’t clear who learns more.

Andrew, of course, is getting ready for kindergarten. Lizeth is getting a peek into the art of teaching children how to read.

Their “lab”--a bungalow classroom on the Reseda campus--cultivates the talents of high school students who want to work with children.

Amid knee-high tables and alphabet rugs, teenagers from Cleveland High and nearby Reseda High receive lessons in the many ways beginning students learn and grow.

Some of the 132 juniors and seniors in the Careers With Children program want to become day-care workers. Many, including Lizeth, want to become teachers.

Through the program, which counts as an elective class, the students learn about nutrition, child development and other essentials. They also learn how to introduce children to the fundamentals of reading and writing.

That means learning how to pick out a good book with few words and plenty of colorful pictures. It means holding a book shoulder-high so children can see when reading aloud during “circle time.”

It means varying the pitch of their voices to keep children engaged in stories. And it means improvising and using imagination.

But most of all, it means patience.

“You have to teach step by step,” said Lizeth, who wants to be a preschool teacher. “Otherwise, they won’t learn. You have to be willing to teach.”

The preschool has become a popular fixture among parents, who pay $100 a semester for their children to attend, about two hours a day.

“It gives kids a little head start when they hit kindergarten,” said Terri Fowler, whose 4-year-old daughter, Heather, attends the preschool.

In all, the high school students help teach more than 1,000 preschool and elementary school pupils.

“If you look at the classrooms where the high school students work, you see an increased sense of enthusiasm for reading and books,” said Jack Bagwell, assistant principal at Napa Street Elementary School in Northridge. “The idea that there is someone who is taking an interest--and it involves reading, being read to, and talking about books--is very exciting.”

Careers With Children received a boost this year when it was awarded a $2,000 grant by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The money was used to supply the preschool lab and the other school sites with new children’s books.

The funds also enabled the program to launch an early literacy section in Cleveland High’s library.

Some of the high school students check those books out to read to brothers and sisters at home. Others practice with the books in the preschool lab and during the program’s instructional time, on Mondays and Fridays.

On those days, the high school students create lesson plans and are required to read aloud in front of their peers--using their textbook on child development, their teaching journals or the children’s literature.

“It’s an opportunity,” said teacher Robert O’Connor, the program’s coordinator. “Some of them get cold feet when they have to read from an 11th-grade text. It’s not that they don’t know how to read, it’s that nobody has ever required them to do reading.”

The technique has paid off for junior Crystal Stone.

“If I don’t understand a word out loud, the teachers will help me sound it out and give me the definition,” she said. “When I see it again, I know what it means and how to read it.”

Indeed, the oral reading is an exercise in confidence-building.

On a recent morning at the preschool lab, 20 children gathered on the carpet with their teenage mentors.

They recited the Pledge of Allegiance together and sang the days of the week. Then they plopped down and watched as senior Erica Parker opened a colorful book about a wide-mouthed frog.

Silence fell over the room. The children trained their eyes on the 16-year-old reader. Their mouths dropped open as they listened.

Erica read in a clear and strong voice.

“It feels good to know that I have someone looking up to me,” she said afterward. “I don’t have brothers or sisters of my own. They are my brothers and sisters.”