By Jessica Easthope
Let’s set the scene: seven-year-old Bryan Rumfelt is trapped inside by the coronavirus pandemic. Like other kids, he’s missing story time at school and not visiting his local library, so he came up with a way to fill that void.
It’s called “Bryan’s Book Corner,” a Facebook page where Bryan posts videos of himself reading books to kids.
“‘Bryan’s Book Corner'” is this thing I do,” he told Currents News. “I read books to kids because of the COVID-19, and because they don’t have story time, I’m reading them books online.”
The theme of “Bryan’s Book Corner” is simple: keep kids happy.
“Some people are sick and some people are at their houses and they’re pretty bored, and so I wanted to make them happy by doing ‘Bryan’s Book Corner,’” he explained.
In Bryan’s cast of characters is his mom, Jenn and his grandma, Donna — the person he credits with starting his online career.
“He said, ‘Oh put that on Facebook,’ not knowing that it was going to explode,” said Donna. “I just put ‘Bryan’s Book Corner’ and put a video up, and people just went crazy for it.”
It wasn’t long before the “Bryan’s Book Corner” page had close to 1,000 members. It doesn’t take reading glasses to see Bryan knows how to captivate an audience, especially with his many voices.
Though this chapter is slowly coming to an end, Bryan won’t be putting this story back on the shelf any time soon.