UCI ready for preschool

Marisa O’Neil

Whittier Preschool’s little students will get some help from their

bigger counterparts with a new UC Irvine program set to start next

week.

Students from Jumpstart Irvine, which focuses on literacy for

preschool children from low-income families, will work with children

in the state-funded preschool on a one-on-one and on a group basis.

The program seeks to get students ready for kindergarten and expose

college students to child development.

“We’re looking forward to this,” said Gladys Green, Newport-Mesa

Unified School District’s preschool program director. “The college

students get to work firsthand with children, and the children get

the one-on-one attention they might not normally get.”

Many of the UC Irvine students are taking part in Jumpstart as a

work-study program, but others are doing it as volunteers, said

Virginia Mann, professor of cognitive sciences. Some of the students

are majoring in child development, but it is not required for

participation.

Mann was working to improve literacy for young students before she

discovered a Jumpstart bookmark while sipping a latte at Starbucks,

which helps sponsor the program. She decided to get it started at UC

Irvine.

“I like the idea of students giving back to the communities like

the ones they come from,” Mann said.

Forty-three students will spend about 10 hours a week working with

students at Whittier as well as Pio Pico and Lowell preschools in

Santa Ana, Mann said. They will read, play, sing and do other

activities with the children, many of whom are learning English as a

second language.

“I can really relate to those kids because when I was growing up,

my first language was Spanish,” UCI junior Alex Barajas said. “I had

a hard time reading and writing for a while in school. I wanted to

get involved and help them.”

Barajas, a drama major, is the first in his family to go to

college. Working with college students, Mann said, helps show

preschoolers that one day they, too, could go on to higher education.

Improving literacy in children early is important to helping them

succeed in school, said Anthony de Guzman, Western Region marketing

director for Jumpstart.

By the time they start kindergarten, children from low-income

families, he said, may have been read to as little as 25 hours. Their

middle- to high-income classmates may have had more than 1,000 hours

of reading time.