Mike McCormick was talking about the unlikely meeting of a bumble bee and a bear.
Actually, he was reading aloud about characters featured in a children’s book. McCormick was connected online via Zoom with a boy of kindergarten age who followed along with him. They could see each other, as well as an electronic version of the illustrated book that highlighted printed words as they were spoken.
McCormick, a member of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UMass Boston, wasn’t reading with a grandson or anyone he had even met until recently. He was participating in an innovative pilot project initially developed to help two kinds of people who often struggled with the limitations imposed on daily life by the COVID-19 pandemic – young children and older adults.
Please click here to read the full “A COVID-19 response: Intergenerational tutoring program matches OLLI members, young children for online learning” article published by the Gerontology Institute, University of Massachusetts, Boston.