“Marco and Mateo had been looking forward to the state fair all summer,” Eva Veizis begins reading to about a dozen expectant children on a Saturday morning in September at the Germantown Library. “Finally, one breezy night in July, it arrived!”
As Eva narrates the fictional boys’ adventure, she pauses often to allow the other story time volunteers to share props with the children that relate to the tale and are meant to be touched, sniffed and heard. The items include a board of colorful sequins representing the bright lights of the fair, a roller coaster made of ribbon, a plastic Ferris wheel with a button to play carnival music, and a funnel cake and cotton candy made of plush fabric.
“They change color!” Fabrizio Carranza, then 5, says as he rubs his hands over the shimmering sequins. “I’m going to change them back,” he says, ruffling them again to restore their rainbow colors. A little while later, he buries his face in the fuzzy funnel cake.
This 30-minute multisensory storytelling for children in pre-K through early elementary school is being conducted by Readability, a student-led nonprofit that develops programming for neurodivergent children who may process information more reliably with the help of all their senses. The sessions are usually capped at about 12 youngsters.
Eva, 18, a senior at Rockville’s Thomas S. Wootton High School, is secretary of the organization, which was founded at the beginning of the 2023 school year by Sophia Campbell.
Sophia, now a 17-year-old junior at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, says she has never forgotten how, in elementary school, she saw some special needs students being excluded or teased by other kids. She later began looking for ways she could volunteer to help by drawing on her passion for creative writing. “I was just thinking about how can we instill a love for reading in young children and particularly children who might not be able to necessarily enjoy the kinds of books that are out there,” Sophia says. She didn’t find any existing programs to join, but she learned from online research that “neurodivergent children benefit most from sensory integration into activities. I thought about how this could be applied to storytelling. And essentially that’s how the idea of Readability came around.”
The group now has chapters at four high schools in the county, including Quince Orchard in Gaithersburg and Richard Montgomery in Rockville, as well as one at St. John’s College High School in D.C. In addition, students working independently in Howard County, Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia, have started chapters and volunteer at local events, while others in New York City, and the states of Texas, California and Washington have formed chapters and contribute stories, research and advocacy to the effort, according to Sophia. Her mother, Maria Demetriou, helped register the nonprofit. In addition to programs through the Montgomery County Public Libraries (MCPL), Readability has held events in collaboration with the National Children’s Museum and Turning the Page in Washington, Imagination Stage in Bethesda, and Montgomery Parks.
“I actually heard about Readability through Instagram … and I was like, whoa, this is such a cool organization,” says Nilaya Mijangos, 17, a senior at Richard Montgomery. She and Kaveesha Punchi, 17, a junior, started a chapter at their school and say more than 30 students signed up during a club fair this past September. More than 150 joined the chapter at St. John’s College High School in D.C., says Joanna Lizas, 15, a sophomore and vice president of Readability.
Parents say they are grateful for this programming. “It’s really hard to go to regular story time,” says Germantown resident Samantha Singley, who attended the Germantown Library program with her 3-year-old twin boys. “There’s too many people, they get overwhelmed and have a meltdown. We never get through one.” But this time “they actually were engaged. … It was very accepting. No one gave me dirty looks because my kids are not sitting still.”
Anna Alderete, the mother of Fabrizio, the boy who took such pleasure in the sequins and the funnel cake, says her son’s brain processes visual information in such a way that his vision is impaired. “When he touches, he has a better sense of how the real world looks,” she says, noting how he used his hands to explore the ribbon track of the roller coaster prop. “When he saw the roller coaster, he has no idea how it looks from far away. But now tracing the structure with his finger makes a connection in his brain.”
The teens brainstorm story concepts and write texts with titles such as Henry the Frightened Ghost and Farmer George’s Fall Harvest. They make about a dozen props per story, sometimes with the help of components they order online. To pay for materials, they hold bake sales and use funds from a $1,500 grant from Giant Food, Sophia says. School chapters can hold their own events while also contributing volunteers to events organized by Readability leaders.
Maranda Schoppert, MCPL early literacy and children’s program manager, says the libraries have offered multisensory storytelling in the past, and she invited Readability to present programs in five libraries this past fall. “From what I’ve seen so far, they’re a great group, and I’m hoping we can continue the collaboration with them,” Schoppert says.
Last spring at a county special education fair, Shanna Sorrells, senior manager of access and inclusion at Imagination Stage, was checking out services available locally. “I stumbled across their organization and I was like, oh, this is cool.” For each of its productions, Imagination Stage offers a sensory-inclusive performance. Sorrells started inviting Readability to set up in the lobby with props—created by the student volunteers to go with each show—for audience members to experience before and after sensory-inclusive performances. They did Miss Nelson Is Missing! in June and Petite Rouge: A Cajun Red Riding Hood in January.
On a Sunday morning in late September, Sophia and 17-year-old Noor Frisby, Readability’s co-president, along with other students, volunteered at a table set with items associated with Imagination Stage’s Winnie the Pooh. Children flocked to spoon the gooey “honey” (made from clear school glue, contact lens solution and gold glitter), touch the sticky paper, rub Eeyore’s tail and Owl’s feathers, and stamp images of Pooh and Piglet.
“It’s another sensory way to access the show, so you can see it, you can hear it, and then you can also feel it,” Sorrells says.
Noor, a senior at Churchill, adds, “Hearing a story is a lot different than touching and smelling the props. … We want to slow the story down so that they can understand it as much as possible.”
This appears in the March/April 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
