Several students from the Righetti High School Warrior Writer’s Club recently spent some time distributing donated books at an elementary school to promote the joy and benefit of literacy.
The students came up with the community outreach idea and planned the field trip to Liberty Elementary School after they received 36 popular young adult novels from the SLO NightWriters group.
At the school, the club members divided the sixth-grade students into small groups where they read together and spoke about writing. The Righetti students also facilitated a short writing activity for the Liberty sixth graders.
The Warriors discovered that helping to create a larger population of lifelong readers and learners was both rewarding and inspiring.
“I was honored to be a part of this amazing meeting of creative minds and loved sharing my feelings and the inner reading and writing spirit with them,” ninth-grade student Savannah Mance said in a press release.
Eleventh grader Shaye Reed agreed, adding, “It was such a wonderful experience. I felt like I helped to encourage the great readers and writers come about in the world.”
Ronnie Myers, who is in 10th grade, believes “connections” were made by a sound design.
“I think it’s great that the SLO NightWriters chose to have teenagers speak to the kids because we were able to connect and relate to them more than adults,” Myers said. “I truly wish I could have experienced this when I was in sixth grade, since that is when I started seeing writing as a hobby, rather than just a subject in school.”
The club has about 20 students who gather at lunch to share and read aloud creative pieces of writing: poems, songs, personal narratives, fictional short stories, and novel drafts, according to Righetti reading specialist Kristen S. Kurth.
“During the meetings, they praise one another for their inspiration, confidence, and ability to create and share their work,” Kurth said in the press release.
This article appears in Jun 9-16, 2016.