Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Rae-Edzo (Mar 13/00) - Reading for rewards has changed the way kids think about books with the DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) program.

Students at Elizabeth Mackenzie elementary school in Rae have gone from reading for prizes to reading for fun said school principal Dave Matthews.

"I think largely, there has been a super-attitudinal change," Matthews said. "What we're seeing now is children are beginning to enjoy reading. They are beginning to feel confident in reading, because we accept their reading.

"We're not here to criticize their reading, we're here to enjoy their reading," he said.

The DEAR program has sparked an interest to read through incentive and celebration of the children's accomplishments, but the unique program has sparked a real change in attitudes about reading, Matthews said.

"For 15 minutes every child in the school reads and we accumulate those minutes throughout the school year and we have now gathered 260,000 minutes of reading," he said. "When we reached 100,000 minutes, we had a drum dance."

For the quarter-million minute milestone, the school held a parade through town with banners, a reading bingo and a feast with some local elders.

"All these are incentives, but the beauty of it is, kids then begin to read just for the sake of reading," Matthews said.

As well as learning English, the Rae school has also taken a lead in restoring the original language, but Matthews said there has been many hurdles to overcome.

"The Dogrib language was never a written language -- it was purely an oral language," he said. "There was no history of people reading in the home, so we've had to play catch-up here."

Each day during the "drop everything" period, a child comes to read to the principal himself.

"They come up to the office with any book and they read a story to me," Matthews explained. "Maybe as young as kindergarten -- what they will do is memorize the story and that's fine. They'll point at the words and look at the pictures and tell me the story.

"As far as I'm concerned, they've read a story to me," Matthews added with a smile.

Their name goes up on the Dave's List of Readers and they get a pencil, certificate or a sticker for their troubles.

Grade 1 teacher Alice Rabesca says her 16 students have shown great improvement since the program's inception.

"Some of them are doing really well," Rabesca said. "We've got about seven who can really read good and the rest are coming along good too."

Even at the Grade 1 level, children are taking to learning in Dogrib, she said.

"They can sing in Dogrib, count, say their colours and simple words like 'mother,' 'father,' brother' and 'sister,'" she said. "I think English is more easy, because they learn how to read it and then they learn the Dogrib because they have basically the same alphabet sounds."

Mary Matthews teaches Grade 5. She says the kids are now showing interest where there was none before.

"Even the children who weren't reading before are reading now," Matthews said. "At first it was just looking at pictures, but then they get tired of looking at pictures and they start reading the captions and then they start reading at their levels."

"They've really started feeling good about themselves," she smiled. "I'm very, very pleased with how they are doing."

One of her students, 12-year-old Brendan Moore, has finished 60 books since the program started.

"I like to read about adventures and like rewards we get," Moore said. "I want to be a journalist and a photographer, because I like writing and I like taking pictures."

While reading to principal Dave, six-year-old Tyson Michel summed the reading program up in two words, "It's fun!"