By: Kari, Ali, Levy, Jaretzi
“You have a superpower, and if you can figure out at this time in your life that it is important to serve other people other than yourself, there is no other feeling like it in the world. Giving back will make you wealthy.”
-Larry Abrams
To begin the day, we had bagels with many different flavors, fruit, and juices. We had a slower start after the day of hard work at Palmyra Nature Cove yesterday, and got ready to leave the school at 9:15 heading for BookSmiles.
At BookSmiles, we started off with an introduction from Larry Abrams, the founder. The goal of BookSmiles is to give books to kids who can’t afford them otherwise, and they supply books of different levels ranging from toddler to young adult. Abrams was inspired to start BookSmiles because he noticed the struggle that many people had to afford books, which negatively affected the reading levels of his students. He felt called to change that, so BookSmiles was born in order to combat the issue.
The day continued when we sorted the books, categorizing them by quality, reading level, and the age of the book. It made people happy to see books that reminded them of their childhoods, with some interesting finds. Larry showed us books dated back from the 1700s, showing the evolution of books from then to today. We continued to ask questions about how the older books came to be found and what typically happens to them, finding out that he keeps them as a reminder of why he continues to help those in need.
After arriving back at the school and eating lunch, we traveled over to the Lower School to hang out with the first graders, and our goal here was to build community and learn one of their favorite adding games. Getting to hang out with the younger students helped us understand how it’s not only important to help out outside of our community, but within it as well.
After the adding game, the culmination to the day was traveling over to Hartman Hall to check out how the Robotics and Engineering Intensive Learning was doing. We found out that they had a competition tomorrow and were testing their robots to see what finishing touches they needed to make.
”A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies … The man who never reads lives only one.”— George R.R Martin