To counter the cold weather brought by January, Grier School students brought a sense of warmth by participating in two reading events for children in the past week. Both the storytelling event run by the National Honors Society and the International Read Aloud Day event led by student volunteers contributed to a stronger local community
On the last day of January, the National Honors Society went to Tyrone-Snyder Public Library to read to children as part of their service pillar within the society. “NHS wanted to do an off-campus community service with the surrounding community, and since we all like little kids, we decided to have storytime at the local library to continue getting kids interested in reading and learning,” said Mrs. Brubaker, Grier’s NHS advisor.
The NHS members were able to choose their books themselves to read to kids in different age groups. The book choices showed deep considerations. “A lot of the books I chose for reading were actually the books that I loved to read to my son when he was little,” said Mrs. Brubaker. “For the baby group, we did a lot of boardbooks, which are age-appropriate. For the middle group, we have a book called ‘The Little Blue Truck Leads the Way,’ which has good rhymes. With the older group, we did some longer books that we think they would enjoy.”
It was clear that the children attending the event got a lot out of interacting with Grier students. “The little girl in the baby section came up to me and she sat on my lap when I was reading the story,” said Charlotte Raynes, ‘26. “And after I finished the story, she grabbed more books and put them on my lap, and was wanting me to read them.”
While these sweet moments were definitely the highlight of the event, Raynes did admit that sometimes keeping the children’ s attention was difficult. “I would say the most challenging thing about reading to the kids is getting their attention and keeping it throughout the entire story,” said Raynes. “I did it by hamming up a little bit with my voice when I was reading the story.”
Besides storytime, the National Honors Society also prepared different activities for the kids to participate in. “The kids also got to decorate their drums with stickers, as well as doing coloring pages,” said Ms. Brubaker.
The librarian also played music for the kids as they crafted and the NHS students joined in the playing and creating. “I sang along with the songs that the librarian played,” said Raynes. “I helped the little kids picking out their stickers for their drums as well as their coloring.”
This is undoubtedly more than a book-reading event to both the NHS members and the kids. Mrs. Brubaker said that she hoped NHS members would gain “pride and joy from working with our community and helping children. And I hope the kids enjoy it and continue to come to events like this so that we can continue to build a good relationship with the kids and the community.”
The NHS members also expressed their willingness to participate in another event like this in the future. “I feel very fulfilled and I want to do this again,” said Raynes. “This is a really good way to build community, make lasting friendships and memories.”
International Read-Aloud Day was just four days after the NHS storytelling event, so student volunteers returned to Tyrone to read books to elementary students at Tyrone Elementary School.
The unique part of the world read-aloud event is that students read the books in different languages. “This year the students read in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Tigrinya to the kids,” said Ms. Dunklebarger, who directed the event. “I read to the students in Tunisian Arabic because that’s my first language and I know it best,” said Amalys Zahrouni, a junior.
“The purpose of this event is for the elementary students to hear familiar children’s stories in both English and a second language,” said Ms. Dunklebarger. “It is a great opportunity for the elementary students to hear foreign languages and to meet some students from different countries around the world.”
The process of reading books creates a joyous memory for both the students reading the books and the kids listening to them. “We read two books [to the kids]. We gave them a word and asked them to raise their hands every time they heard that word,” Zahrouni said. “One interesting thing is that for one of the words we gave them, they didn’t just recognize the word, but they recognized the conjugated forms of the word as well.”
Zahrouni also found some challenges during the storytelling. “They had a little bit of inexperience with geography as a concept,” said Zahrouni. “For example, they thought Africa was in Asia and there were fifty languages in fifty states. But it was easy to overcome since we just have to give them more information and engage with them.”
The challenges also gave the Grier students new insights and understandings into what it means to work with yougn children. “Experiencing this with the kids and talking to them made me realize how important it was to expose them to all these cultures and languages that they don’t know of,” reflected Zahrouni.
The international read-aloud day meant a lot for both Grier students and the elementary students. “I hope the elementary students may be inspired to learn a new language themselves,” Ms. Dunklebarger said. “And I hope the Grier students can become comfortable speaking in front of the audience, learn how to interact with others, as well as share their native language and culture with other students to educate them.”
