11 year-old started a book club for boys to improve literacy
A lot of kids love to read, but not many kids take that passion and harness it into a full-on movement.
That's exactly what Sidney Keys III is doing. The 11-year-old started Books N Bros, a book club for him and his peers to celebrate African-American literature and promote literacy. And to say it's a success is an understatement.
“Books N Bros is a book club for boys and we read books and African American literature because every time I go to the library at my school, there aren’t many African American literature books there,” Keys explained to St. Louis on the Air.
During a visit to EyeSeeMe, an African-American children's bookstore in Missouri, his mother filmed a Facebook live video that eventually went viral.
“He hadn’t seen [a bookstore] like that before and I certainly never had, so he was making himself comfortable on the floor, reading a book,” Key's mom, Winnie Caldwell told St. Louis on the Air. "I would like to make sure he sees himself in being whatever he can be.”
“I already love to read and since we don’t get that much time to read in school, we just discuss in groups. I wanted to read a book but I also wanted to discuss it with other people,” Keys said.
He can do just that every month with seven to 10 boys from the ages of 8-12 years in a local Microsoft store—and when they are done discussing everything from Hidden Figures to Danny Dollar Millionaire Extraordinaire, 30 minutes are reserved for video games.
“We specifically reach out to boys around ages 8-10 because that is statistically the age they stop reading — we wanted to combat that,” Caldwell told St. Louis on the Air. A partnership with a similar book club for young girls, called Nerdy Girls, seems to be in the works, too.
“My motivation is I already love to read, but it would be awesome, even better, to read with other people,” Keys said. “I want to keep doing it because I don’t know what will make me stop reading because I love to read.”
[H/T St. Louis on the Air]
Topics Books
