The National Junior Honor Society recognizes students based on five characteristics: leadership, scholarship, character, citizenship, and service. This year, officers and members of the society engaged in a service project that reflected all of those characteristics and JA’s commitment to sharing the joy of reading. Coached by Preschool Librarian and local actress Ali Dinkins, the students recorded videos of one another reading children’s picture books aloud. Those videos will be combined into a digital library and shared with Jackson Academy Lower School and Spann Elementary School students in the coming weeks.
When the school year began, Maxwell planned to bolster NJHS involvement by providing a community service opportunity to members. “We were thinking about offering tutoring for fifth and sixth graders, but we can’t do peer-to-peer mentoring due to social distancing protocols,” said NJHS Advisor and JA teacher Rosanne Maxwell. The concept for this project came about when Middle School teacher Castlen Rogers suggested using videos to share stories. In November, when Maxwell presented that idea, the students were immediately on board. “You should have seen the eighth-graders; they were so excited to reread these stories from when they were little.”
In January, NJHS officers Anna Adkins, James Chaney, Caroline Flechas, Graves Haraway, and DeDe Miller recruited volunteers for the project, and everyone involved began to select the stories they would read. All current National Junior Honor Society members were invited to participate, with 25 videos already recorded this month and more likely to participate. New members may also have the opportunity to be involved during the remainder of the school year. In their videos, Caroline read The Rainbow Fish and DeDe read Guess How Much I Love You. Recording those stories was the girls’ favorite part of the project.
“We started off with these little bedtime stories, and then, in honor of Black History Month, we thought we could expand,” Maxwell said. Lower School Librarian Jana Ragland had just what the group needed. She selected brief biographies of significant Black leaders like Rosa Parks and Scott Joplin for the students to read aloud.
“When you’re sitting there reading with a child, you get that immediate feedback, you know that you are impacting that child, but our members are not going to experience that,” Maxwell commented. While the pandemic continues, doing community service will look different and continue to require creativity and commitment. “It’s kind of like doing something and never knowing the result.”
All of the Middle Schoolers involved previously participated in book buddies and knew what a rewarding experience it can be to invest in younger children through reading. The videos that they have created will be shared with Lower School students at JA and Spann Elementary. JA has had a relationship with Spann Elementary for several years. As a part of the Barbara Bush Foundation’s Teen Trendsetters program, Upper School students would read with students at the school each week, led by Upper School teacher Audrey Wilkirson. Due to the pandemic, that project has been on hold. Maxwell said that “From the beginning, we wanted to make this accessible to those elementary students as well.”
Josh Hinkle, who serves in Technology and Creative Services with the JA Tech Center, is currently working to create an application to install on all JA Lower School students’ iPads that will allow them to view the videos. JA will also share the library of recorded stories with the teachers and students at Spann Elementary. Although the students won’t experience the same rewards that come with reading books to younger students in person, they hope that the videos will inspire younger students’ love of reading.
“In one word, it was nostalgic,” eighth-grader James Chapman said. “You’re so used to someone else reading those types of books to you, but now you get to do it for someone else.” Knowing how many students will see his video inspired James to prepare so that reading the story was natural and fun. “I didn’t really see it as a service project because, for me, it was just fun.” James hopes that parents and children alike benefit from the videos – parents getting to take a quick break and children enjoying the stories.
