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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Merry Christmas from ECBC!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! ECBC has enjoyed celebrating the holidays with CHOC patients by providing holiday-themed literary joy throughout the month. For the last few weeks, we have been reading aloud wonderful Christmas and other December holiday literature to patients at bedside through our bedside reading program. We have also gifted new holiday books to kids who are inpatient and stuck in isolation via our mobile gifting cart. We delivered a substantial number of holiday book to the outpatient side of the hospital — the Outpatient Infusion Center and the Oncology Clinic — more than 500 new titles. We provided storytime at Miracle Manor’s Christmas party (Miracle Manor is Miracles for Kids’ subsidized housing for families of CHOC patients). And, we delivered holiday cards to CHOC patients that were handwritten by local elementary and high school students. In total, we gave away approximately 800 books this month that hopefully resulted in additional quality time with excellent Christmas/Hanukkah/Diwali/Kwanzaa literature!

THANK YOU to everyone who donated books this month and helped to make this all possible. If you would like to make an end-of-year gift to ECBC to help fund our December book gifting, please click on the link below. Note that there is also an option to commit to a recurring monthly donation, which will help to fund our ongoing monthly book gifting (which is about 500 books/month — approximately $5000 in cost per month). All donations are tax deductible (ECBC Is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, EIN 83-2934289).

Thank you for helping Orange County’s hospitalized kids to thrive through the holidays with high-quality books and reading!


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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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Outpatient Holiday Book Delivery!

Today, we delivered a TON (288, to be exact) of new December holiday-themed books to our mini-libraries at CHOC Children’s Outpatient Infusion (OPI) Center and CHOC’s Oncology Clinic! This allows all patients who visit the oncology clinic or OPI in the next few weeks to pick out a terrific holiday book — with choices ranging from lift-the-flap board books to Christmas- and other-holiday themed picture books to holiday-themed graphic novels, joke books, and chapter books for middle graders and teens/ young adults. We also re-stocked our inventory of Read Think Thrive Bags for kids who are diagnosed with cancer.

We are STILL in need of more holiday-themed books to be able to offer them to kids on the oncology and neurology floor on the inpatient side in the coming weeks! If you would like to donate a book, please CLICK HERE to access our amazon wish list. All books will be sent directly to ECBC, and bookplates will be added with donor names.

THANK YOU for helping hospitalized kids thrive through the holidays with books and reading!


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CHOC Holiday Book Deliveries

We just completed the last of our holiday book donations with these deliveries to CHOC inpatient oncology and neurology kids on the 5th floor as well as for CHOC’s outpatient oncology kiddos visiting the infusion center and the clinic. Three hundred wonderful holiday-themed books that will hopefully result in lots of reading and reading aloud! A huge thank you to all our amazing donors!


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ECBC at Miracle Manor

Ethan & Choco’s Book Club was SO very honored to be part of Miracles for Kids’ holiday party for CHOC patients and families living at Miracle Manor (a home subsidized by Miracles For Kids for 12 low-income CHOC families with critically ill children). With the generous and expedient donations of our community, we were able to deliver sets of books for all 25 patients and siblings living at Miracle Manor, all curated by the age, gender, and interests of each child — and books were passed out to each child by “Santa”, a 17-year old Leukemia patient himself. Additionally, one of ECBC’s awesome bedside reader volunteers, Fenny, provided an engaging holiday-themed storytime for the kids. We loved adding books and reading to these families’ holiday festivities (and how amazing that during the festivities, Miracles for Kids volunteers were busy decorating each of the family’s apartments for Christmas!). THANK YOU Miracles for Kids for letting Ethan & Choco’s Book Club participate in this magical event, thank you Fenny for making time to be there for the kids, and THANK YOU to all who donated so quickly and so generously to allow this to happen! Check out these amazing pictures!