Matthew Alves is not a big man. He's short, shy, and exceptionally quiet — his voice is just a hair above a whisper.
But the 10-year-old St. Albert student does have a huge passion for reading.
"I like reading a lot," he says, "so I want everyone else to be able to read."
He got a good start on that goal this Monday when he helped haul about 2,000 new and used books to St. Catherine School in Edmonton. The books were collected as part of a donation drive he organized at St. Albert's école Marie Poburan.
Librarian Anita Sheehan is positively giddy as box after box of books piles up in the St. Catherine library.
"This is like a dream," she says, her eyes sparkling with joy. "You guys rock!"
Small idea, big results
Sheehan gushes as she shows some of the books to a crowd of St. Catherine students in the library.
"This will give you scary dreams!" she says, referring to one with a tiger and the word "Predators" on it.
"Woah!" say the students.
The idea for this book donation started last fall, says Kara Weis, a Grade 5 teacher at Marie Poburan, when she asked her students to think of a message they wanted to share with the world. Most students came up with ideas like saving the environment, but Alves had something different.
"He loves to read," Weis says of Alves. "He has a book in his hands all the time."
Alves wanted to spread his love for reading to other kids, and asked Weis if he could start a reading club and a book drive for other kids. Weis had previously taught at St. Catherine and knew they could use the books. After clearing it with her boss, she helped Alves organize the book drive.
Starting in December, Alves and a few fellow students made announcements to publicize the book drive at Marie Poburan and gathered donations from each classroom.
Their initial goal was 600 books, or about two per student, but a book fair held at the school in the first week blew that goal out of the water.
"Parents were buying books and putting them in the bin, brand new books right off the shelf."
They had about 700 books by the end of the week, she says, and she was scrambling to find boxes for them.
They were getting about 200 books a day at one point, estimates Jadynn Gansauge, one of the students involved with the book drive. "It was fun seeing the number of books just get bigger and bigger."
They ended up with 1,907 books and spent much of their recesses in December sorting the flood of books into piles — piles that soon took up the whole front of Weis's classroom. "If you work together," she concludes, "you can make a really big difference."
The collected books range in age level from K to 9, Weis says, and include everything from the Twilight series to Green Eggs and Ham.
This donation is equivalent to about 10 per cent of size of the school's current library, says principal Dwain Tymchyshyn.
"Our breath was taken away," he says. "We'd expected maybe three or four hundred books. I had no idea it was going to be 2,000."
Some of these books will be going home with the students to keep, Sheehan says.
"It's going to make better readers out of our kids because they are going to have books to take home."
The donation has also a great experience for students at Marie Poburan, Weis says.
"A lot of my students haven't even met students who don't speak English," she says, and many of the students at St. Catherine are from other countries. "To do a community project where they help kids like that is such a big deal."
The reading club is finished for now, Alves says, but he hopes to bring it back next year. He isn't sure what the club will do next. "It makes me feel happy to see everyone happy with the books."
