Children at the Lifting Lives Shelters had a few special visitors for story time Thursday.

Members from the Vicksburg Kiwanis paid a visit to the shelter Thursday afternoon and read to a group of children from the shelter as part of the club’s commitment to supporting children in the community and throughout the world.

“We have so many members who are interested in the children,” Vicksburg Kiwanis Club president Heidi Burrell said. “I think it is important for the kids to see it is different jobs, it is different people in the community and how diverse we are. They can see and relate to that.”

Storytime at the shelter has been occurring weekly since October, and Thursday marked the second month that the Kiwanis club has volunteered to read and support the children on one of the Thursdays.

The weekly story time was started as part of Elizabeth Cowan’s Girl Scout Gold Star project during which she created a library for children at the shelter. Each week, volunteers come and read to the children, provide them snacks and do an arts and craft project related to the books they read that week.

“We have built marshmallow tours. We’ve had boat race challenges. We’ve done an art project based on Picasso,” Stacy Weaver, who helped organize the story time, said. “What I have seen the most is the kids are more comfortable with us now and they’ve come to enjoy story time. At first, none of them wanted to take books. We had one little boy in particular who would throw himself down and refuse to take a book out of the library. Now, it’s the first thing he wants to do. That was the goal of the project — to get them interested in reading.”

Thursday’s art projects included coloring and labeling the parts of a flower and planting lima bean seeds. The projects were chosen after the children listened to ‘Oh Say Can You Seed?: All About Flowering Plants’ and Dr. Seuss’s ‘Lorax.’

“I enjoy reading to kids so I sometimes read at the Real Men Read, and I like the Lifting Lives Ministry and what they are doing here for homeless families,” said Kiwanis member Jim Chaney. “It is a good thing to give back to the community. I think they enjoy hearing the story and I hope it will encourage them to become readers and give them a male role model who likes to read.”

The Kiwanis club supports the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library’s summer reading program and also participates in Real men Read at Sherman Avenue Elementary and the United Way’s L.E.A.R.N. program where each third-grader in Vicksburg receives four free books throughout the schools year.

“The kids have to live in this situation and knowing that weekly somebody is coming to help them, that is what Kiwanis is,” Burrell said. “Our mission is one child, one community at a time. We are here helping with them on a monthly basis and maybe it can grow into them coming and figuring out how we can get them to our library project this summer.”