The bilingual book club, started by two OHS seniors, Gabriel Miña-Reyes and Natalia Urbina, has helped bring joy and excitement to non-English speaking second grade kids and their parents each month. The club was created because the two students wanted to give back to the community by providing a monthly book club for children and their parents who can’t speak English. The students are provided a number of books that they request from the Oxford School District to give to the kids at each meeting. At the end of each month, the students meet with the kids and their parents at Della Davidson Elementary and have pizza while discussing the books.
“For me, I wanted to start the club because I moved here from Honduras when I was five and reading was a big help for me whenever I moved here so I wanted to provide that for other kids and parents as well,” Urbina said.
However, the club isn’t just for kids. They also give a copy of the book for parents to read with their child and to help them learn English along with their children.
“I got the idea for the club because I remember growing up and although I could read in English and understand English, my parents couldn’t understand it and most of my friends had the same problem,” Miña-Reyes said.
Each month, the students go over the book that the club has been reading while enjoying some pizza, and they have a fun, interactive activity that goes along with whatever book they are reading. At the end of the meeting, the families receive an English and Spanish copy of the chosen book for the next month for them to read once they get home.
“We have different activities based on a book we’re reading, Like if we’re reading a Magic Treehouse book and it’s on dinosaurs, then we will have an activity based on dinosaurs,” Miña-Reyes said. “We had a Thanksgiving Magic Treehouse book that we did, so we had thanksgiving activities. It’s sort of activities based on the books so that kids can see that reading is not only reading, but also fun.”
The club isn’t just a book club, however. The two students also often bring in speakers that will be interesting and helpful to the different families. They are also provided pizza by the Ole Miss Grisham-McLean Institute for Public Service and Community Engagement.
“Occasionally, we bring in someone to speak about a topic or something that we think would be interesting to the families or the kids that could help them out,” Miña-Reyes said. “Once, we had someone from The Salvation Army come to promote their Christmas special offering families who couldn’t afford gifts a chance to buy them at a discounted price.”
There are multiple ways for people to get involved in the club, but the students put up flyers and invite people they know to join the club. The club welcomes anyone that comes and hopes that more people will continue to join.
“What we did when the club was starting was we gave flyers to all the teachers in Della since the club is for second graders,” Miña-Reyes said. “All Spanish-speaking families should know about the club so that if they ever wanted to, they could just show up and they would be accepted.”
