Ethan & Choco's Book Club

Striving to make access to books and reading a core part of the care that SuperKids receive in the hospital, with the principal premise that literacy support for children fighting cancer and other life-threatening conditions can help promote cognitive development and social connections that are part of thriving through treatment and beyond


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Holiday Reading for CHOC Patients!

On Monday we delivered several hundred December holiday-themed books to our outpatient libraries, and yesterday we filled up our Gifting Library Cart on the inpatient side at CHOC for kids who are stuck in the hospital over the holidays. We also added wonderful holiday books to each age category of our Read Aloud Wagons. Thank you to Bedside Readers Mary Kay and Suzanne for launching holiday storytimes in patient rooms yesterday! Patient favorite of the day: Tough Cookie: A Christmas Story (by Edward Hemingway).

We will continue to re-stock our gifting cart with holiday books for the month of December as long as we have inventory…but we will go through the books fast since the hospital is at full capacity. Please consider donating a book from our holiday wish list! Click HERE to access the list.


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Final Four Days of BOOK IT!

There are just four days left of ECBC’s annual BOOK IT fundraiser, and we are just shy of 2/5 of our fundraising goal. We are hoping for a strong finish in these last few days as we need to do significantly better to keep funding all of our book and reading programs and CHOC Children’s Hospital. Each day of these last few days, I am sharing a photo of an Oncology kiddo at CHOC whom our programs have benefited. Here’s today’s featured warrior: a child on the inpatient side who is being read to by Mary Kay, one of ECBC’s amazing bedside readers/literacy coach experts who shares quality literature and reads aloud in a way that models and nurtures literacy skills and rich dialogue. Oncology patients are often not attending school and missing literature-based classroom experiences, and they also often receive chemo that affects their neurocognitive functioning — so this program aims to provide cognitive benefits in addition to social and emotional ones! Our bedside reading program depends on hardcover books for read alouds, paperback books that can be gifted, art supplies for book-inpspired crafting, and other support materials such as bookmarks, motivational reading bracelets, parent “how to support literacy through treatment” pamphlets and various operational costs including off-site storage of books. If you haven’t yet donated and would like to help us continue to fund our inpatient bedside reading program, we would so appreciate your support. Donate at www.runsignup.com/BOOKIT2022.

Click image above to donate


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ECBC IS BACK!

It was so wonderful to be back on the inpatient side of CHOC Children’s Hospital today with our Bedside Reading program and our mobile book cart (after being on hold since March 2020)! It is still so quiet there with still no events and limited volunteers, which were always an integral part of patient daily life at CHOC. So we felt wanted and very much needed! And how it warms my heart to learn from one of our expert bedside readers that, per patient request, she read aloud with a 16 year old for 35 minutes (Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories)! It can be tough to get a teen to agree to reading aloud, but when they y do, they often find that it’s enjoyable and a great break from they screen. Also, for the first time we were able to offer our “Tips for Caregivers” pamphlet with information about how they can help their kids to read, think, and thrive while at the hospital and going through treatment. They seemed to appreciate this resource, and we hope it will result in increased reading parents and caregivers in kids’ hospital rooms!


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Getting Ready to Return to CHOC…

ECBC Bedside Reader “re-group & re-train” (group 1) in preparation for our return to our inpatient program at CHOC next week! I am so grateful for our group of educators, librarians, and reading specialists who provide high quality read-aloud for the hospitalized kids who need it most! We are super excited to be back at CHOC next week!