Student Contributor -B. Bazaldua
For this project, students will be learning about animal shelters and their role in our local community. After that, students will get to make no bake doggie treats and donate them to SpokAnimal animal shelter. After they finish making their treats they will get to go on SpokAnimal’s website and choose the dog they would like to donate their treats to.
To start off, I brought my second-grade students together as a whole group to introduce our activity. During this lesson, I taught them about how important it is that our community has an animal shelter and that they help give homeless animals a place to stay until they find a loving home. After the lesson, we had a discussion on what they learned, and to my surprise, many of the students were so moved and inspired to help give back. This is when we decided that it would be fun to make no-bake doggie treats to help make the dogs in the shelter feel special. I reached out to
SpokAnimal and they said they would love to partner with us for this donation project! Once we had our partner organization in place we got to work on our doggie treats. The tricky part of this project was finding a no-bake recipe that didn’t include peanut butter considering some students have allergies. Finally, after some research, I found a 3-ingredient recipe that called for coconut oil, pumpkin puree, and oats. The kids had a blast making these and even completed an instructional writing piece describing how to make these treats so that they could make them on their own at home! After we made them each student placed their treats in a goodie bag with their name and the name of a dog on it and I delivered them to the shelter the next day. This project turned out to be very meaningful to the students because not only did they understand why we made the treats but it inspired them to want to give back to the community outside of our classroom!
Overall, the project went very well! It definitely had more of an impact on the students than I expected! I loved seeing how their eyes lit up when they were making the treats and learning about why we were donating them. One of the biggest things I had to modify was the recipe. It was tricky to find one that didn’t contain nuts or peanut butter. That is why it is very important to consider your students’ allergies. I would suggest that if you do this project to just make sure you plan it out in stages. For example, my stages were to start with an introduction lesson, then make the treats, write about how we made them, and then place them in the goodie bag.
Name: Adriana Mortier
Project Name: No-Bake Doggy Treats
Organization Partnership: Humane Society of Spokane
Organization link: https://spokanehumanesociety.org
Project size: Small
Summary of Project: First, I called the humane society to make sure it was ok if I donated treats. This project was done with 1st graders, and using the book, “Madeline Finn and the Shelter Dogs”, I introduced the topic of animal shelters and that an animal shelter is a place for dogs who are waiting for a forever home. I sparked the children’s interest with pictures and discussions of our own dogs and what they like. We talked about how the girl in the book brought the shelter dogs blankets and books and we collaborated on what else we could bring to a shelter for the dogs. Once we landed on treats and food, I explained to the students that we were going to make no-bake doggy treats for our local shelter here in Spokane. I explained to the class that while I had small groups in the back making treats, the rest of the class would be making paper plate dogs using the provided cutouts and googly eyes. While I called small groups back at a time to roll the treats, put them into bags, and choose a shelter dog they want to donate to, the rest of the class created paper plate dogs with markers and cut outs of ears, legs, nose, googly eyes and a tail.
Once the project was done, I donated the treats to the humane society and the students got to bring home their paper plate dogs, which were based on shelter dog pictures that I showed them.
Things to consider: I premade the dog treats, so when I got to the classroom, we could just add water and coconut oil and stir. Having a laptop set up in the back to show the students pictures of the dogs was great as they all got to choose a dog so it felt more personalized and they wrote the names on the bags themselves with a sharpie. The making of the paper plate dogs is optional, as you could have your students read or work on their computers while small groups are called back, but I wanted them to have something to take home to remember the project and their contribution to society.
Which grade levels would be best for this project?: 1-4
I used the same recipe for the dog treats as provided in the original project and created the paper plate project myself. (paper plates, markers, scissors, glue, googly eyes, hand traced legs, ears, nose, and tail.)