Booking OSU players to read to kids is big hit
Jashon Cornell might be intimidating on Ohio State’s defensive line, but he was anything but as he navigated Dr. Seuss’ picture book “Fox in Socks.”
He gamely tripped through the tongue-twisters, grinning as the third-graders sitting on the carpet (and their teachers) giggled.
Columbus’ Como Elementary School in North Linden hosted Cornell and two other Ohio State football players — long snapper Liam McCullough and offensive lineman Blake Pfenning — as “celebrity readers” on Friday afternoon, the last day of Read Across America Week.
“Oh my goodness, when we told (the kids), they were so excited,” third-grade teacher Christine Gould said of the trio’s visit. “They’ve talked about it all week. They wanted to know who was coming.”
After the class gave Cornell two hearty rounds of applause for surviving the book, hands shot up. A third-grader asked him how old he is, and her classmates gasped. “Rude!” one of them chastised her. “I’m 20,” he said, amused. Another asked what Cornell does other than sports. He outlined his typical schedule of workouts, classes, tutoring sessions and meetings.
“So even college football players go to tutoring, see?” Gould said. “So they never stop learning, either.”
“School is very important,” Cornell said. He told them, post-football, he would like to be a financial planner.
Read Across America is an annual weeklong reading celebration in schools that was started by the National Education Association in 1998. It coincides with March 2, Theodor Seuss Geisel’s birthday.
Dr. Seuss, who died in 1991, would have been 113 on Thursday.
Many of Franklin County’s elementary schools have gotten in the spirit, with hat days and crazy sock days. Staff members ran around as the Cat in the Hat and Thing 1 and Thing 2. Superintendents, politicians, TV anchors and athletes read to classes.
Hamilton Elementary School near Obetz invited people from the Franklin Soil and Water Conservation District to teach a lesson to first-graders tied to the famous environmental book “The Lorax.”
State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria read to two classes at South-Western’s Harmon Elementary School on Friday morning.
“The students loved him,” South-Western spokeswoman Sandra Nekoloff said. “He’s very vibrant when he reads, and he really listens to their questions.”
At Como on Friday afternoon, after the OSU football players left, students gathered in an assembly to celebrate reaching their reading goals for the week.
For every 100 minutes a student read, he or she earned a piece of tape with which to tape Principal Summer Anthony to a wall. Then two readers with the most minutes were allowed to shove a pie in the face of Como Reading Specialist Heather Thompson.