By Kids, For Kids

By: Leah

This year one of our fall service projects was a books on tape undertaking, where we decided to record the voices of ICS students reading children’s poems. We wanted to make the project fun and memorable, so we selected some of the silliest poems we could find  - unsurprisingly, Shel Silverstein’s work made the cut. Poems like “Homework Machine”, Cookwitch Sandwich”, and “Zebra Question” were only a few of the enticing titles we chose.  Our project was titled A Collection of Voices: Poems Read by Students, for Students, and it turned out awesome.

Title page (Pay no attention to the glaring glare!).

Our project involved a lot of hard work from our students. They were first given the poems to practice, and were then recorded for the CD (strangely there were no tapes at the electronics store…). Each student had to make his or her reading as perfect as possible, as we couldn’t piece together parts of the poems to fill in mistakes. They did such a great job! I was so impressed with the quality of readers at ICS, especially the younger ones. They put effort and expression into the poems, and you can really hear the hard work through their voices.

A sample page from our book – I’d live in that castle.

In addition to recording the poems, students created drawings to go along with each page of the book. The best pictures were selected to go in the final product, and the pages were mounted and laminated to give it a finished look. The book includes a pocket in the back where the CD can be found, and the poems are consistent with the CD tracks. About 10 students read the 17 poems on the CD, and they did such an amazing job. We decided to donate the book to the Meeting Street School Library, where students there could get the benefit of both the visual and audio components.

Like celebrities, lamination is always better in person.

The ICS students who participated in this project should not only be proud of their verbal reading skills, but also what they contributed to our service project. It was very well received at Meeting Street School, and I know that a lot of students there will enjoy listening to the recordings and following alongside the words and pictures for years to come. Job well done!

Our back page with a batman-shaped glare.