Remaining true to the Eskimo fight song, the Edmonton Eskimos underwent a BOLD endeavour on Monday: One day and a whopping 13 school visits to celebrate Read In Week.
Players, the president/CEO, front office staff and members of the cheer team visited classes across Edmonton to spread awareness of the importance of reading.
Throughout the week, the Eskimos will make a few more visits, but Monday was the major undertaking.
Eskimos President and CEO Len Rhodes was on hand at St. Richard Catholic Elementary school to bring his enthusiastic style of reading to the students.
Rhodes had the kids shouting and laughing along while he read. The impact was quite apparent to everyone in attendance.
“I had fun. They gave me a book about dogs and I got to interact with the kids. When you engage them and do sometimes goofy things, they love it. They were all paying attention,” Rhodes says.
The exuberant style runs in the Rhodes family.
“I have a sister who is a school teacher and she uses a lot of creative methods to reach out to the kids.”
Alongside him was Eskimos slotback Aaron Kelly who was taking part in his first Read In Week as an Edmonton Eskimo.
“I was a little nervous, I’m not going to lie, but it was fun,” he said after reading Creepy Carrots to the kids.
Afterwards, Kelly told of the importance reading has in his life as an athlete. “To play sports, first of all you have to get your grades and reading is fundamental to that and your life in general. It’s good that we’re spreading that.”
“When a pro athlete like Aaron Kelly walks in, kids love it and he’s a star in their eyes. He can do no wrong and seeing the faces of these kids says it all,” Rhodes says.
“It’s a pleasure to do this. As a community-owned team, we have a major commitment to give back and 16 schools being visited by our organization this week is phenomenal. No one comes close to what the Eskimos do.”
Across town at J.A. Fife School in north Edmonton, Eskimos safety Cauchy Muamba re-enacted a Saturday morning tradition from his own childhood.
“I can remember as a child my parents on a Saturday morning would wake us up early in the morning and bring us to the library for most of the day and we’d pick out a book and just read,” Muamba says. “It was really something very important for us. The more you read the more you know. Knowledge is very important for everybody.”
Nestled in the school’s library, he read Gros Bobo by Jeremy Tankard to a contingent of 30 grade four and grade five children. Muamba, who grew up in Montreal, read the book in French — much to the delight of the schools immersion students.
“To have someone who speaks French here in the community is awesome. The kids don’t see a lot of that so to have an actual player come and do that was fantastic,” says Sarah Wilson, a teacher at J.A. Fife.
“The kids see them as sort of the celebrities in Edmonton and to just have them come gets the kids excited to share and to read. It helps them relate that everybody reads.”
Muamba spent the morning having the kids tell him their interests in French.
“It was fun,” Muamba says. “Just looking at the faces and seeing them learning French was really something amazing. They had a lot of fun having an Eskimo player who spoke French in front of them.”
The Eskimos Read In Week tour concludes Thursday.
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