“Kids these days.”
It’s a familiar refrain from adults that children today spend too much time playing video games or connected to tablets and iPhones and not enough time reading, playing board games or exercising. But when Mother Goose arrived at the Sim Scott Community Park Center Monday afternoon with her trademark goose puppet and a book to read to a group of more than 20 young children, there was not an iPhone in sight.
Mother Goose came to read as a guest speaker during the community center’s summer program, according to program supervisor Rena Hill. Parents sign their children up to be part of the program. Every day, the children get breakfast and then spend some time outside before doing activities. They have some play time before eating lunch and then they go to the gym. Around 2:30, they get a snack, and the rest of the day is devoted to play — or occasionally to a guest speaker like on Monday.
“I’ve loved it,” said Hill, who has worked at the Community Center since January. “I already love being around kids. If I could, I’d run my own day care out of my house.”
Hill and the other staff who look after the kids provide the children with the games they request. Hill said they all want to play board games and card games — Uno, Candyland, Marbles and Monopoly to name a few.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the children go over academics, reviewing subjects like math and English in workbooks. Even story time wasn’t all fun and games. Mother Goose made sure to go over the definitions of title, author and illustration, and reminded the kids of the correct way to treat books.
Cameron Coleman, 8, is attending the program for the first time this year. He is learning the alphabet in Spanish. He said he thought he may be able to get up to the letter I now, but his favorite thing to do at the program is play basketball.
It was Cameron who played the Old Man during Mother’s Goose’s reading of “It’s Too Noisy” at the community center Monday. As the children listened to the story about an old man complaining about the noise around his house, Cameron stood beside Mother Goose bent over with one hand on his back and occasionally growling in his best old-man voice: “It’s too noisy!”
Cameron’s Old Man was the favorite part of the story for some of the kids who listened.
“When Cameron was the old man, he kept saying old stuff,” said Makenzie Cunningham, 9.
Makenzie and her sisters, Mariah and Makayla, are triplets from Caledonia who attend the program almost every day. Like Cameron, they prefer active play to board games and story time — specifically dance. They, along with three of their friends, put on an impromptu dance after the story for a Dispatch reporter during which they all sank into splits in unison.
Sha-meriah Roberts-Fields, 9, was one of the dancers, but she danced even before Mother Goose arrived. While the other children waited on the story by playing board games or Uno, Sha-meriah practiced her dance routine in a clear spot on the floor, much to the amazement of the children watching her.
After Mother Goose left and as parents began arriving to pick their children up, the kids all went back to playing board games, talking about Cameron’s performance in the story and excitedly discussing their trip for the next day — the bowling alley.
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