Don’t tell these kids that reading is boring.

To the handful of 6th graders responsible for the new Little Free Library project at East Elementary School (EES), it’s anything but.

Under the guidance of EES Media Specialist Savannah Wood, eight students are embarking on a reading experiment they hope will take root and become a permanent feature of the community: setting up a miniature curbside “library” that anyone can use, free of charge.

The Little Free Library isn’t just for students — it’s for everyone. Situated in a nicely-crafted, enclosed bookshelf designed to withstand the elements and fashioned to resemble a schoolhouse, the outdoor book depository looks like an oversized birdhouse perched at the corner of Fourth Avenue SE and Seventh Street SE on the East Elementary campus.

Relying on the honor system, anyone can come along and take a book home, said Wood. All the students ask, in return, is that patrons leave a book for someone else to enjoy.

“People can come and take a book at any time, and hopefully they’ll leave one of their own books for other people to read,” explained Wood. “There are two shelves: a top shelf, which will be books for adults, and then the bottom shelf, which will be for children. There’ll be a clipboard in there for visitors, so we can kind of keep up with how it’s being used.”

The library is the result of an annual project that asks students to test their collaborative problem-solving skills, with each year’s project focusing on addressing and resolving an issue that students have identified.

In this case, the problem is the “summer slide” — the deterioration in reading skills that tends to occur among students who put their noggins on hiatus for the three summer months that separate one academic year from the next.

“We researched the ‘summer slide,’ which is when you don’t read over the summer and your reading level ‘slides’ lower than it was when school let out,” explained Ella Kate Green, one of the 6th graders responsible for getting the library up and running.

“This is one way for students to keep their reading level high over the summer, but it’s also just a good way to encourage reading for everyone.”

One cool aspect of the free library is that it engages the community. It’s not just for kids.

“We did not put those books in there,” said Wood on Thursday, more than a week before the library’s official opening date. “The community has already donated the books that you see that are already on the shelves. The community took it upon themselves to do that, so we are already encouraged and excited about how this is going to be received.”

Although the library is already stocked and ready for use, the school will officially commemorate its opening this Friday with a 9 a.m. dedication ceremony.

Once that’s done, students will observe how the library performs, with an eye toward expanding the concept to other locations throughout the county.

“We’d love to have these in more places: north, south, east and west,” saids Wood. “Hopefully, in the future we can collaborate with other schools and maybe put one in Hanceville on the south end of town, and Vinemont on the north end of town, and so on.

“The kids who have been involved in this — they’re really great leaders, not only in their grade, but also in their school. This is a big, project-based learning activity; one in which the project is the end result. The community is a huge component of it: there has to be a problem within the school community, and there has to be a solution.

“And these students have really met that challenge.”