R.O.C.K. and R.O.L.L.* Reading Offers Children Knowledge and Reading Offers Life-Long Learning

During the R.O.C.K and R.O.L.L. program, individual or small groups of young children are read to by Seniors from our community. We have tucked away rocking chairs and reading "nooks" throughout the school to allow for quiet reading areas, and have chosen books from our collection of fairy tales. These stories possess a richness and depth that is pleasurable and profoundly meaningful to both adult and child. Students from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 3 who would benefit from some special time with our Senior "rocker" volunteers, may come to hear these traditional stories.

      
Senior volunteers read to two children at a time, 
for 20 - 30 minutes, 
    with juice and cookies provided.

Why fairy tales? 

"For a story truly to hold the child's attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems that perturb him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality - and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child's predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and in his future.
In all these and many other respects, of the entire "children's literature" - with rare exceptions - nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale. True, on an overt level fairy tales teach little about the specific conditions of life in modern mass society; these tales were created long before it came into being. But more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension."
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment - The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Random House, 1975