A Breakthrough

When you give a moose a muffin, he’ll want some jam to go with it. When you give a child a book, he’ll want nothing to do with it.

Or so I thought.

It happened last Thursday. I was in the Writing center, drawing colorful dots on a print-out dog when one of my Jumpstart friends placed her tiny little hands on my picture. I looked up. My green eyes were met by large brown ones and a shy, sweet smile.

“Where’s the book?” she said.

“What book?” I asked.

“The book that we read today,” she said, pointing to my drawing. “About the dog.”

I looked down at my drawing for a second, then back up at her.

“Oh, you mean ‘The Dog’s Colorful Day?’” I inquired.

She nodded excitingly, recognizing the book by its name.

“Hmm, well it was here a second I ago…” I said as I started looking under uncapped markers and crinkled papers.

I poked my head under the table to see if it had accidently fallen there.

“What did you say you needed it for?” I asked as I came up empty-handed.

“I want my dog to look like the dog in the book,” she replied earnestly.

“Ok,” I said.

Although I remembered bringing the book over with me to the table, I concluded that one of my team members must have put it back in our supply box by mistake. Thus, I left the table to go fetch the book from the box and brought it back to her.

“Here you go,” I said, holding the book out for her to reach.

She took it in an instant, laying it flat on the table and flipping to the page with the picture of the dog she liked best. Using her tiny elbows to hold down the book’s corners she begins to draw…

At the time, I didn’t realize just how groundbreaking this moment was for my Jumpstart friend. I didn’t realize that a connection was being made. Most kids her age, if given a print-out of a dog to color spots on, would have just scribbled ambiguous, red tornadoes on the paper and swiped it off the table. But she, she did something different. She used that book as a reference. As adults, we do this all the time. We look up words, we verify facts and we write essays using books as our tools. But in a four-year-old’s world, books serve no purpose. To make a book worth looking at it, someone has to read it to them, someone has to fight a child’s disinclination to sit and pay attention…

Since last Thursday, I can’t stop thinking about this girl. Something magical had to have happened inside of that little brain of hers. I don’t know if it was the dendrites branching out, or her little neurons firing in a sequence never prescribed before, but something very special happened that day, and I got to bear witness. I bore witness to a rare, isolated moment of childhood development.

I bore witness to a breakthrough.

~Leila Nasser

Corps member

Team Joy