Student Contributor -H. McCarthy
We held a school wide food drive where students/teachers bring in canned food/nonperishables. After multiple weeks of the food drive we also asked communities members to donate shoe boxes. The students put food into the shoe boxes, decorated them and gave them to meals-on-wheels. The students also walked them over to the nursing home across the street and gave them to the elderly people there.
To begin this project, I explained what Meals-on-Wheels does for the community, giving hot meals to those in need of food. I had an open discussion with the students about what they think these people in need do when the Meals-on-Wheels trucks can’t make it to them, for example, during a snowstorm. As a class the 5th graders decided that we should give them food, just in case the trucks couldn’t get to them. Because we had the intention of them using this food during a snowstorm, we named them Blizzard Boxes. We held a school wide food drive for nonperishable items. We let this go on for 3 weeks. Food lined the halls, the foyer & my mentors’ classroom. We also asked community members to bring in empty shoe boxes. After 4 weeks we got together as a group and made decorations for the top of the blizzard boxes. We cut white construction paper that covered the top of the shoe box then the students colored the top. They wrote Blizzard Box on it, and also wrote a note to go in the inside of the box. The note said something kind, as well as Love, McDonald Elementary. After the top covered were glued on we packed the boxes with 1 entrée, 1 vegetable and a dessert. We gave a lot of boxes to Meals-on-Wheels to distribute, and we also walked them over to the nursing home across the street.
-Give the food drive enough time to ensure a lot of food is donated.
-Ask for shoeboxes that have tops that completely off.
-I did this with an afterschool group, but it could be modified as an in-class art project time.
-We had a hard time communicating with the nursing home manager to get a time for us to come bring the boxes over.
