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

Tag Archives: ThrivePartnerSchool


by Leave a comment

THANK YOU TVT!!!

HOW COMPLETELY AMAZING IS THIS??! Tarbut V’ Torah (TVT) Lower School just collected and donated 1,024 new books for ECBC! This is impressive for a school of any size, but TVT’s lower school has only 410 students! A ton of great books of every type — this will help us for months! TVT has always been our strongest school partner, donating 200 or more books every year since we started ECBC. But this year they knocked it out of the park! They beat their own school record from 2019 of 310 books, and they far exceeded their goal for this year of 350 books. They also almost doubled the school donation record across all school donors of 531 books!

THANK YOU TVT families for helping ECBC help hospitalized kids to thrive through treatment with books and reading. Congratulations to the 4th graders for collecting the most books and earning the ice cream party (which apparently the whole school now gets due to the generous cash kickback from Scholastic!)! And a very special thank you to the Diaz family for your super significant contribution!!!  Also thank you to the 4th/5th grade leadership class for your amazing efforts at rallying the school with your posters and videos — it is so exciting to hear that every kid got on board! And thank you to Galina and Hayley for all your help organizing the book drive. ECBC is so very grateful for our ongoing partnership with TVT!


by Leave a comment

Ethan speaks at TVT

Co-founder Ethan speaks at Tarbut v’ Torah’s (TVT) Lower School, where he shares his story of battling cancer and founding ECBC. This kicked off the book drive that TVT will host next week alongside their school book fair, where the 4th and 5th grade leadership class will try to rally the school to beat their 2019 record of 310 books. ECBC is so grateful for TVT’s annual support since 2016! 


by Leave a comment

THANK YOU Fairmont Private School North Tustin!

A huge THANK YOU to Fairmont Private School North Tustin Campus for your donation of 139 books—all great, high-demand titles! A great success for a small school of only 300 students! And thank you Tina Jussal for coordinating the book drive! We are so grateful for your support! And even more grateful to learn that Fairmont wants to support us every year! (We need more Thrive Partner schools who support us annually). #schoolbookdrive #thrivepartnerschool #kidshelpingkids #readthinkthrive #thriveagainstcancer #cognitivehealth


by Leave a comment

Thank You TVT!

A GIGANTIC thank you to Tarbut V’ Torah’s Lower School for their amazing donation of 310 awesome books, which they collected during their recent Scholastic Book Fair. This is TVT’s 4th consecutive year holding a book drive for ECBC, and this donation is the largest number of books we have received from a school to date! THANK YOU TVT for your ongoing commitment to ECBC and reading for kids at CHOCk Children’s Hospital; we appreciate your support so very much. A special thank you to TVT kindergartener and Leukemia warrior Liam for helping to deliver the books! What a terrific way to start off 2020!

Ethan & Liam making sure kids at CHOC have books to THRIVE AGAINST CANCER like they have! (click image for brief clip)


by Leave a comment

Thank you Myford Elementary School!

Ethan with the 309 new books from Myford Elementary School!

Thank you Myford Elementary School for your amazing donation this week of 309 new books (mostly for our Gifting Library)!!!  This is our most significant school donation yet! This donation included terrific titles for all ages and interests, including highly popular chapter books and picture books (e.g., I Survived books, Percy Jackson books, Roald Dahl books, Judy Blume books; Magic Tree House books, Beverly Cleary books, Weird School books, many Newbery winners, high interest graphic novels, and much more). We now have a heightened need for new book donations since we are giving away so many at CHOC, and especially since we are getting ready to launch the first phase of our inpatient program on the patient floors at CHOC!

Also, a HUGE thank you to Myford Elementary teacher Mrs. Danielle Clawson for organizing this awesome effort (and of course to Principal Rena Fairchild for supporting it)! Mrs. Clawson rallied her school behind a school-wide Scholastic book drive, where they attached a cover letter to students’ Scholastic Book Club order forms that were sent home, giving parents the opportunity to order books for hospitalized kids. We are so excited that so many Myford families contributed!

Scholastic Book Club orders are such a terrific and easy way for schools to bookraise for ECBC, because book collection efforts can occur alongside schools’ already existing Scholastic book order programs. Teachers benefit too, because the additional book purchases earn them more points for receiving books for their classroom libraries. We are finding that attaching a cover letter to book order forms is an easy way to do this — Click here  to download this letter. You may also email us at ECBC@maxloveproject.org to receive an editable version of this letter that can be modified to work for your school. Please consider following Myford Elementary’s lead and organizing a school-wide Scholastic Book Club book drive! We want to add more schools to our small starter list of ECBC Thrive Partner Schools!

A few Myford Elementary students with their book donations!

Thank you Myford Elementary and Mrs. Clawson, we appreciate you so much!


by Leave a comment

Thank you Tarbut V’Torah — ECBC needs more schools like you!

THANK YOU to Tarbut V’Torah’s Lower School for such an AMAZING student-led book drive! TVT collected 219 new books in just one week, and this school only has 253 students! Here’s Ethan’s video explaining what TVT did and thanking this awesome school. We need more schools like Tarbut to help us create a sustainable library at CHOC Children’s Hospital! 

Click here to view Ethan’s video thanking Tarbut.
Email to find out more about leading a school book drive or becoming a Thrive Partner school!


by Leave a comment

TVT Community Day School is ECBC’s first Thrive Partner school!

img_0160-2How awesome is this?! A couple weeks ago, fifth graders at Tarbut V’Torah (TVT) organized a book drive at their school book fair, and the Lower School collected a total of 250 new, high-quality books for the library that we are building at CHOC Children’s Hospital! Afterwards, the school invited Ethan to their campus and presented him with the books in a very special school assembly. Afterwards, I sent a thank-you note to the school, and in return I received an amazing note from Laura Roth, the principal of TVT’s Lower School. Principal Roth’s note expressed TVT’s commitment to hold an annual book drive to benefit ECBC and CHOC. We are so excited to have our first Thrive Partner school (a commitment to ongoing annual support)! Thank you TVT!  Click here to view Principal Roth’s letter: tarbut-ecbc-thrive-partner-letter

I am sharing this letter in hopes that TVT can hopefully inspire other Orange County schools to get on board and support ECBC’s efforts to build a library for Orange County’s hospitalized kids. Building and maintaining a hospital-based library has some unique demands that include significant built-in loss of books, so we will need to have ongoing support from a variety of sources to create a sustainable library. We’re hoping that Orange County schools can be one key source of support!

Please consider helping your school join Tarbut and become an ECBC Thrive Partner school!  Here are four ways your school can help:

  1. Hold a new book drive at your school. Perhaps get your student leadership on board to organize a school-wide effort.
  2. Collect new books for ECBC as part of your school’s regular book fairs.
  3. Organize a book collection effort for ECBC through your school’s Scholastic Reading Club program.
  4. Collect needed items for Ethan’s Read+Think+Thrive Boxes, which will go to patients at CHOC who are in isolation and can’t borrow books from the Lending Library, as well as to kids battling cancer and life-threatening conditions across the country who have limited access to books. Contact ECBC at ECBC@maxloveproject.org to receive our R+T+T Box Needs List.

* Remember, per hospital policy, all books must be brand new.

Thank you again, TVT, for being our first ECBC Thrive School!