Tell Me A Story: Sneha Thomas’ read-aloud volunteering project

Sophomore Sneha Thomas has always been a creative person, leaning toward writing and drawing to express her creativity. Since the pandemic has taken away creative, hands-on interactions for a lot of younger kids, Thomas set up a way for elementary schoolers to still experience storytelling through an online story time.

Inspired by her eight year old sister who’d picked up reading for the first time during the pandemic, Thomas realized how important it is that kids are still reading when they can’t go to school and interact with other kids due to the pandemic.

Thomas started “Elementary School Online Story Time,” a volunteer project through East’s SHARE program at the beginning of the school year. The idea came to her after realizing how elementary schoolers’ educations — especially when it comes to learning how to read — have been strained due to the pandemic. 

“During this pandemic, kids aren’t as interactive as usual and parents are working from home, and they have to deal with their kids a lot, so a way to keep them busy would be for them to listen to online story time,” Thomas said. 

Through her project, high school students can pick up their favorite childhood story — or any picture book from East’s library — and record themselves reading. The videos are then sent to the librarian at Tomahawk Elementary School, who posts the videos on their library’s Canvas page. 

“The librarian at Tomahawk has emailed me to tell me that everything’s going great, and that the kids are watching the videos that she’s been posting,” Thomas said. “She’s also created a little template, that kids can just click on so they can easily watch the videos.”

To make the project as simple and accessible for volunteers as possible, Sneha’s only criteria is for volunteers to show their faces and have an optimistic attitude when reading.

“Since most children’s books are picture books, they would have to show the pictures of the storybook, and I said that I would prefer if they could show face in the video because it’s just more fun if you can see the reader,” Thomas said.

Sophomore Kate Whitefield, who’s submitted a video of herself reading, enjoyed the project, as it reminded her of when she was able to read to the kids at her elementary school when she was in fourth grade.

“I got to pick out a couple of books, and with that I tried to make sure that it wouldn’t be too long [of a book] to where the video would get long and the kids would get bored, and I wanted it to have pictures and [for it] to be something that they may have not heard of before,” Whitefield said. 

According to SHARE co-coordinator Sheryl Kaplan, Thomas created and led her project entirely on her own. She only needed guidance with fine-tuning her idea, as her original plan involved working directly with students — which isn’t possible with the current COVID-19 restrictions in place.

“I know that she’s really being persistent,” Kaplan said. “I think she had a little bit of a hard time getting people to do it at first, and then we posted a flyer that she had come with on social media for her, but she’s really handled everything.”

Though the school year has come with unprecedented circumstances, Thomas hasn’t let distance stop her from moving forward with her project and actively promoting her project through flyers and social media, making it a unique volunteering opportunity to go with a unique year. 

“It’s just one of those projects that’s showing how we’ve had to adapt the school year with COVID and remote and everything, and just that if you think outside the box of just being hands on and being there you can come up with a lot of ideas,” Kaplan said. 

Thomas will continue to accept videos until at least the end of the school year, and calls for anyone who wants a quick and easy way to get involved with volunteering to record a short video.

“If kids don’t feel like reading books themselves, and if parents don’t feel like reading it for them, or they don’t know how, there’s some videos that kids can click on that volunteers read to them,” Thomas said. “All they have to do is find a book that they like and click on a video and watch it.”