By Tiffany Cassidy
paNOW Staff
Shantana Pounder is a bit of a book worm. Conveniently, her Riverside Community School has just been given a huge grant from Indigo to revamp their library.
“We definitely need some new books to what we have right now so it will definitely be a better addition to it,” said Pounder.
The school found out May 9 that they were one of the winners for the Indigo Love of Reading program.
They will receive $41,000 a year for the next three years. For these years every Riverside student will take a field trip to Indigo in Saskatoon to pick out one book for their classroom and one for the library.
Pounder said the opportunity means a lot in terms of finding books the students will really be interested in.
“We get to pick the books that we want in the library instead of the books they bring in for us,” she said.
Winning the grant was not an easy process. The application had multiple parts and took a team of staff members about 60 hours to complete.
The creative portion of their entry was what really pushed Riverside to the top.
Teacher Shelley Nicolas wrote a comic life story about Wesakechak, a character from Cree legends, who helps save the school that only has one book left.
Grade 8 student Antonia Burns played the character of Wesakechak, and the students posed for pictures to illustrate the tale.
In the end, the spirit of the colour indigo brings stories back to the school.
“We have a high First Nations/Aboriginal population and I thought that writing a legend of Wesakechak would be a good way to also portray that,” said Nicolas.
When Riverside made the semi-finals a few weeks ago, Indigo asked them a big question: “How would $124,000 change your library?”
Principle Mona Markwart smiled as she recalled her answer, and said her kids will be excited to have some ownership over the books in their library.
“They’ll be empowered to read,” she said.
Charmaine Poorman is another Grade 8 student at Riverside who was part of the creative project.
Poorman reads every night before bed, and plans on spending her Indigo grant on the first two books in the Hunger Games series – which she’s read twice already.
But she said part of the excitement was the change to just go on the trip to Saskatoon.
“I don’t really travel a lot, so it’s pretty cool.”
Markwart said she can’t wait to watch the kids as they scan through hundreds of books to find their special two.
