Maple Book Buddies
Cover and class photos submitted by Bourke.
Maple Book Buddies, which started as the AP Language and Composition service project of five current seniors: Maddie Palicka, Grace Houts, Angelika Bourke, Lari Li, and Tyler Schambow, has grown to be something that both high school students and elementary students alike have learned from, with a successful 2025-2026 school year!
What is it?
Maple Book Buddies involves a group of high schoolers visiting elementary classrooms, reading books to students, and doing activities with them. Prior to starting, our group had to communicate often with the five second grade teachers and administration, including setting up meetings to get the go-ahead, verifying the teachers’ availability, and making sure we were clear about our objective. Additionally, we had to organize and plan every grade-appropriate book and activity, which we set up around a certain theme for each month. After this planning was complete, we also recruited other students to help with our project via word of mouth, then held a meeting where we presented our idea and explained our project’s goals. We were able to recruit over 15 helpers, which allowed each classroom of around 20 kids to have a couple of high school students within it each time, and gave the second graders more opportunities to build more personal relationships with the high schoolers. By building more personal relationships, we hoped to encourage the kids to continue to read as they grow older and improve literacy so as to become better readers and writers.
What have we been up to?
All photos from Amazon.
September:
This month, we wanted to embrace “back-to-school” time and read Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, had the students make pigeon comics with their own versions of Don’t Let the Pigeon… and gave them a chance to share their comics with the class.
October:
This month, we wanted to theme the book around Halloween, so we read The Good, the Bad, and the Spooky and made tissue ghosts that students could design with tissues, lollipops, and rubber bands.
November:
Because we wanted this book to be themed around Thanksgiving, we read The Giving Tree and, after brainstorming some ideas on the board, had each student make a hand turkey and write things they are thankful for on each feather.
December:
December is typically a time filled with holiday celebrations, so we read The Gingerbread Man Loose in the School and had the students design their own gingerbread man and share with the class what kind of gingerbread man they made.
January:
In the spirit of January signifying a new year and how there is a “New Year, New Moon,” we read Moon! and had each student design and share their dream spaceship.
February:
With February being the month that contains National Fairy Tale Day, we read Endlessly Ever After, which is a long book with many different endings that we kept reading and allowed the students to choose different pathways and explore all of the endings.
April:
April is a month where we recognize and appreciate the environment with days like Arbor Day and Earth Day, so we read The Lorax, made a class list of things people can do to help the environment, and drew some of them.
May:
When planning this project, we found out that May is considered National Pet Month, so we ended up choosing to read Can I Be Your Dog? and gave the students the opportunity to draw, name, and share out either their actual pet or their dream pet.
We are very grateful for all of the time we got to spend with the 2nd grade classes and hope to see others take on a project like this in the future to help continue to grow these elementary school and high school relationships!
