Worms for lunch, stories for students

SALISBURY — Don Mayland asked Joanne Klein’s kindergarten class, “Would you want to eat a worm for lunch?”“Eww,” said the kindergarten.Mayland was on hand to read Leonid Gore’s “Worms for Lunch?” as part of the Northwest Connecticut Chamber of Commerce’s annual Read Aloud Day, sponsored by the Alcoa Foundation. Townspeople came to the school Wednesday, Feb. 8, to read to students in the pre-kindergarten and up to grade six.Jerry Baldwin, reading the same book to Megan Conklin’s kindergarten class, managed to sneak in a plug for the family business, North Canaan’s Snack Shack, before starting. (Conklin is his daughter.)“I’m sort of retired,” Baldwin, a former banker, told the children.Reading to youngsters is old hat for Erin Simmons, who is the children’s librarian at Scoville Memorial Library. She took Jenn Segalla’s third grade through Josh Schneider’s “Tales for Very Picky Eaters.”The readers this year:Eva Yxfeldt read “One Little Blueberry” by Tammie Salzano to the pre-kindergarten.Baldwin, Mayland and Don Tobias read “Worms for Lunch?” to the kindergarten; Stephanie Pellegrino and Jeff Paine read “Bear’s Loose Tooth” by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman to the first grade.SCS Principal Chris Butwill, Juliet Moore and Mary Ellen Baldwin read Eileen Spinelli’s “Miss Fox’s Class Shapes Up” to grade two. Bonnie Kinsman and Simmons handled “Tales for Very Picky Eaters” by Josh Schneider for the third grade.“Three by the Sea” by Mini Grey was read to the fourth grade by Phyllis Schneider and Dean Diamond, and “Eddie Shapes Up,” by former New York Mayor Ed Koch and Pat Koch Thaler, was read to the fifth and sixth grades by Patricia Decker, Elyse Morris, Rick Cantele, Caroline Burchfield and Sam Herrick.