By Chris Rosenblum
State College Area School District
State High Spanish students recently heard the finale of a story they started — and it was a happy ending.
As a midyear project, the Spanish 3 class taught by Steve Klebacha had written and illustrated storybooks for an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. Following up, Klebacha invited the person who delivered the books during a mission trip to speak to the class.
Mary Herold said the stories brought great pleasure to children with little joy in their lives. Some wound up in the orphanage because their impoverished families couldn’t feed them. Others came from families with drug problems or they ran away from abuse. A few had been abandoned.
Herold’s team members, there to build a library, distributed the books. Two hours later, they returned to the orphanage to find the children, inspired by their gifts, making their own storybooks. Some were for Herold personally, and she showed them to the class, telling the students they had served as role models with the project by motivating the orphanage children to read and write.
The children, Herold said, loved how different each book was. She noted that “small efforts of love can do big things.”
“Thank you for changing the lives of others,” she said.
Klebacha said the book project was “a chance for students to engage creative skills and demonstrate narrating proficiency in Spanish.”
“The students tend to be highly motivated because the books go beyond the typical teacher-graded classroom assignment; they are a real product sent to a Spanish-speaking audience,” Klebacha said. “Through the project, students explore and choose topics that are both culturally appropriate and of interest to the intended audience.”
Junior Will Marsh said he liked the project and presentation “because it was nice to do work and see what kind of impact it had on others.”
“We are just used to doing work, having it graded, and then thrown away, but when you know that it will impact others, that makes it much more fun to do the project in the first place,” he said. “It was also nice to see the pictures of the kids smiling while holding our books.”
