Godwin Heights — Second-grader Blaze Wyatt looked over a stack of books on the table in front of her. She needed to select one — not for herself, but one that would be given to a patient around her age at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital.
“Do you have any chapter books?” Blaze asked. “I like chapter books.”
She finally settled on one from “The Critter Club” series by Callie Barkley.
“It is three books in one, so it has many pages,” Blaze explained. “If you read a lot, you’ll get smarter.”
She also said she liked the cover, which had three kittens on it.
Selecting the books was the culmination of a lesson on community for Blaze and her classmates, second-grade teacher Cassie Atkinson said. Her students created cards for young patients at the children’s hospital, and Storytime in the Park brought books for the students to place their cards inside before Storytime founder Barb Lubic delivered them.
Lesson on Community from the Community
Lubic is Atkinson’s neighbor, and Atkinson’s family has attended the summer Storytime program at Garfield Park in Southeast Grand Rapids. The program, which marked its 15th year at the park, takes place Tuesday evenings from June to August.
For the month of August, Lubic said the program focused on ways to give back to the community, and one activity was to make a card and select a book to be delivered to the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital.
“I needed a few more cards, so I asked (Atkinson’s) children — who were not able to come to that event — to make some for me,” said Lupic, who is a professor at Grand Valley State University’s College of Education and Community Innovation, which donated the books.
“Atkinson thought making the cards would be a good community activity for her students, and I said, ‘Well, you have to have some books to give with the cards,’ and then I mentioned it to Joel (DeJong, owner of Heights Cream) and he said, ‘Well, you can’t have a storytime without ice cream. So it all kind of snowballed.”
Atkinson said she saw the activity as a way for her students to learn about community and community service.
“I showed how Barb is my neighbor, so she is from my neighborhood community,” Atkinson recalled. “I then talked about how she is my friend, so she is from my social community, and then (that) she is a member of the city, so she is part of the city community, and she is a teacher, so she is part of the school community.
“The goal was so they could understand that by doing this project, they were part of a lot of communities.”
Picking the Perfect Book
Atkinson said second-graders practiced how to pick a book by looking over the cover, reading the back summary and then flipping through the book to get a sense of what it was about. Some were already familiar with the titles.
Second-grader Joven Sucaldito spent a few minutes checking out the selection before picking one from “The Bad Guys” series by Aaron Blabey.
“I’ve read it before,” Joven said. “I picked it because I liked it. I like the mystery in it, and the bad guys.”
Classmate Garang Garang selected one of those as well, because of the “funny stuff inside,” he said, but mostly for the cover. The cover of books in the series depict one or more of the main characters: Wolf, Mr. Piranha, Mr. Snake, and Mr. Shark.
Second-grader Emma Clausen said it was the bright, colorful cover of a “Lucky Bunnies” series book that caught her eye, one she has read herself.
“It’s very fun and all happy,” she explained.
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