Booking in for breakfast

Ballymun’s Write Minded programme is helping parents support their children in learning to read and write

OLDER CHILDREN have been seen off to school and there is a queue of women with buggies at the lift inside the entrance of the Axis arts centre, set back off the main road in Ballymun, Dublin.

They are making their way to the first-floor for the third Breakfast Buddies meeting, run by youngballymun as part of its Write Minded programme, to help parents support their children in learning to read and write.

Word has spread and a crowd of more than 60 – mainly mothers and a few grandparents – fills the room. People can help themselves to bread rolls and bacon or yoghurt and fruit, along with tea or coffee.

Here to get advice on how to encourage their children to write, little do they know that within minutes they will be called on to do some creative writing themselves – by collaborating in small groups to produce a poem.

But when the moment comes, there is no embarrassed shirking of the task set by this morning’s speaker, education lecturer and former primary school teacher Mary Kelly. Instead the room buzzes with conversation and laughter as the women enthusiastically rise to the challenge.

The point of the exercise is to show how much easier it is to write when you share ideas. Don’t leave children to do writing homework alone, says Kelly. Instead sit down with them and stimulate their thoughts through discussion.

“You can’t write it unless you can say it,” she points out. “So the more you read and talk to your child, the more ideas they will have in their head.”

She stresses the importance of making paper, crayons, pencils, etc easily available from an early age and encourages parents to “value the scribbles”. Older children can write cards, shopping lists, create comics and keep diaries during the holidays.

A cheer greets the catch-call of “There’s one for everybody in the audience”, when magnetic drawing boards and “Play the Word” games are handed out for parents to take home.

“There was nothing like this 12 years ago when I had my first child,” says Nichola Hennessy (32), who is here with Ryan (16 months), the youngest of her four children. She has attended all the Breakfast Buddies events, as well as a “Story Sacks” workshop on bringing books to life for children.

“I have always read to the children but this is reading on a different scale – it’s about getting more involved, asking questions,” she says.

She knows now how to play educational games with her four-year-old son, which he thinks are great fun. “If I took out a book in a school way, I would get a ‘blank’ from him.”

Katrina Crosbie (36), a mother of three, is at Breakfast Buddies for the first time, having heard about it through a friend. She is impressed. “I think it is great – it gets parents mixing.”

Conor Geoghegan (21 months) is nodding off in his pushchair as he waits with his mother, Bernadette Byrne (32), for the launch of youngballymun’s Big Dreams book after the meeting. They both feature in the photographs which illustrate the book about reading.

Introducing Big Dreams, the Write Minded family and community literacy development officer, Lána McCarthy, recalls how she got her love of reading from her mother. She relates how earlier that morning she asked her 11-year-old son what reading meant to him and was amused by his grandiose reply: “Mammy, it opens doorways to the world to me.”

Also photographed in the book are Esther Saura (38) and her husband, Óscar, who left Barcelona nine months ago and came to live in Ballymun, to immerse their seven-year-old daughter Júlia in the English language.

“It is difficult in Spain to get to a good level and I think English is really important,” says Esther. She is also taking part in the Incredible Years parenting programme provided by youngballymun.

Esther and Óscar have both found jobs and plan to stay a minimum of three years – as a teacher back home told them it would take three years for Júlia to think in English like a native.

But, full of praise for the friendly and supportive community in Ballymun, Esther adds that maybe they will stay “10, 15 years or live always – who knows?”

Youngballymun’s next Breakfast Buddies meeting is on June 22nd at 9.30am in the Axis centre, Ballymun. For more information tel: 01-8624564