St. Vincent’s students podcast storybooks for cancer patients
By Sara Weikel - The Cottonwood Journal (January 2008)

A labor of love that began small and simple has grown to include fun technology.

Last year the second and seventh-grade classes at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School teamed up to decorate hats and write storybooks for about 40 cancer patients at Primary Children’s Medical Center. . That was not nearly enough to provide for all of the children undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital, so this year -- with the help of grants from Youth Ventures and Shopa: Kids in Need -- the second and seventh-graders, along with many other students in the school, have redoubled their efforts in the project. In addition, the stories are being recorded and podcast over the Internet by a St. Vincent’s parent.

“This gives each child in our school the opportunity to share with others,” said Rhea Hristou, the school’s only second-grade teacher.

The storybooks are all the original work of the students and all written on the theme of a magic hat. The accompanying hats -- decorated with plastic jewels, buttons and feathers -- were made to match the hats in the books.

As the front line force of the project, the students worked together one-on-one. Each seventh-grader helped a second-grader organize ideas and put them on paper. Then the seventh-graders typed the stories and the second-graders illustrated them. Each little book was spiral-bound.

This process gave the younger children “a chance to work with older children who can give them advice on writing and composing the aspects of a good story,” said Hristou.

The finished hats and books were placed together on a special “hat tree” in the hospital, made of wood and brightly painted. So far, 35 hat-and-book sets have been delivered to Primary Children’s, with 15 ormore to be delivered soon. Another round is being planned for later this winter.. The school also plans to expand the project to include Shriner’s Hospital in the future.

Dane Falkner, co-owner of a software development company and father of a St. Vincent’s preschooler, has been recording the students reading the storybooks out loud in his podcasting studio and uploading the recordings to the Internet in iPod-friendly formats. He films the students against a green screen, then digitally replaces the green screen with illustrations scanned directly from the storybooks. As the background of the video, the illustrations change each time the child in the video turns a page.

“The podcast gives a voice to the project,” said Hristou. “The children receiving the books can get an idea who the children are that wrote the stories and hear the original author read it to them.”

The podcasts also widen the possible audience for the stories, though the original books are still given to kids at Primary Children’s. The finished podcasts can be found at www.catholicclasses.org/category/catholic-kids. Catholic Kids is a podcast channel produced by catholicclasses.org to have kids teach other kids good values.

Podcasting the stories was Falkner’s idea and he has been donating his own time to do it, said Hristou.

“It gives them a hat, a booklet and video of the reading that they can experience repeatedly and hopefully they know that these Catholic kids have real empathy and love for them,” said Falkner. “We hope it lightens their burden.”