On worship days, St. Luke Baptist Church in Spencer, Oklahoma, is filled with the sound of singing and prayer, hymns rising to the rafters. During weekdays in the summer, the sanctuary is quiet. But the large community room in the back of the church hums with another noise: many soft, overlapping voices of children reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At each of the dozen-plus tables, children sit one-on-one with volunteer mentors. Worksheets with vocabulary lists, word problems, and short stories, as well as markers and pencils cluster around each pair. The kids are engaged and locked into the lesson. They arrived hungry, but after a meal made by St. Luke volunteers as part of Feed the Children\u2019s Summer Feed and Read program, they\u2019re focused and ready to learn!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf kids don’t practice reading over the summer, they become remedial,\u201d Jeannette Williams, a St. Luke volunteer, explains. \u201cAnd when they start back to school, you end up trying to teach them all over again because they’ve fallen behind. They forgot what they’ve learned during the year. But if they read over the summer, they retain what they’ve learned.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n