By ANNA GILGOFF

Special to The Press

Weisenberg teacher Denise Wiik and her fourth-graders just completed a class project during which they raised enough money to purchase nearly 200 books for the Lehigh Valley Children’s Hospital.

“[The fundraiser was motivated] by one of the stories we read in our reading series called ‘My Librarian is a Camel,’ about how children who live in remote places get books,” Wiik explained.

The story encourages the reader to imagine what a library looks like in various parts of the world, perhaps not in a building but on the back of a camel or even on a boat.

“It’s always been important to me to have kids think about how they can better their community, so I gave my kids a writing assignment,” Wiik said. “They had to get books to kids who don’t have access to them.”

Liliana Xander’s proposal won the day.

“I would like to organize a book drive for the Lehigh Valley Children’s Hospital,” she wrote. “Some children have extended stays due to cancer or other illness, so they need something fun to do to make their stay more enjoyable.”

Wiik said the idea was to write a plan to hold a book drive for kids in our community.

To bring the proposal to life, students worked in small teams.

The first step was to write a letter as a class explaining the fund drive.

“I encouraged the kids to share the letter with parents and others,” Wiik explained.

The children each played their part.

“I worked with Nora and Sebastian to make flyers,” Max Sauerzef said. “Everyone took them home so that we could get sponsors.”

The campaign did have some legs, Wiik explained.

“It was just parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts,” Wiik said.

“Even several of my own relatives donated.”

With Wiik’s guidance, the children quickly mobilized to bring the plan to fruition.

“Scholastic has a campaign for books,” Wiik said. “You give them the information and they collect all the donated funds so no money passes hands.

“With the money that we raised, I had kids browse the Scholastic website and write titles of books that they wanted to order.”

“We looked online so we could pick out books for different age categories,” Koli Esterly said.

Grace Zettlemoyer said picking out books for young adults was “kind of hard.”

“We had to think about what people who are young adults would like to read,” Zettlemoyer said.

The project was a learning opportunity.

“We talked about kids needing to stay in the hospital for weeks or even months,” Wiik said. “We talked about how it would be important to have picture books for them.”

“Picking out books reminded me of when my brother was in the hospital with a feeding tube,” Khy Lehr said.

That memory made it that much more meaningful.

The fourth graders were excited about the fundraiser.

“It was good,” Bella Lakatosh said. “It’s nice for the children to get new books so they could read them in the hospital.”

Wiik said they ordered the Harry Potter series and books in Spanish.

“We also ordered some books on mindfulness recognizing the kids’ needs being in the hospital,” Wiik said.

By April 3 everything was said and done.

“Our goal was to raise $300, but we ended up raising a little over $1,000,” Wiik said. “It was really a fun thing for the kids to see the new dollar amount that we had raised online.

Downplaying the time and effort needed to reach the goal, Wiik said the work wasn’t that difficult.

“It was just coordinating all the different parts that took time,” Wiik said. “The whole Scholastic option made this project really easy.

“And not having to deal with the money was icing on the cake.”

The children expressed their thanks to those who contributed.

“We wrote thank-you letters to all the people who donated,” Ella Schmidt said. “It was inspiring. Every time we saw a big jump in donations we got so excited.”

“We wanted to thank everyone,” Addyson Kuhns said. “Anybody could do something for someone, even kids like us.”

“There’s a lot of young children and a lot of them have sickness,” Xander said. “A lot of times we think we’re just one little person, but we really did something good.”