Student Contributor -H. Marsh
I had my students at my practicum create paper flowers and friendly letters for the residents at the Cheney Care Center. The friendly letters are letters that have a greeting, closing, and a body that contains any information the teacher would like. The paper flowers are made from paper and pipe cleaners and are simple to make. The paper flowers and friendly letters would then be delivered to the organization and the organization would then schedule a zoom call or give photos to the school so the students can see what they have done.
To begin, I had the second-grade class create friendly letters and paper flowers. Friendly letters have a greeting, a body, and a closing. Within the body, the students told the residents their age, what they like to do, and something friendly at the end. The paper flowers were made from various colors of construction paper, yellow and green pipe cleaners, tape, and a container to hold the flowers. This was a service to the community because the students’ created gifts for others. The paper flowers and friendly letters made the residents at the Cheney Care Center happy. This was powerful for the kids because they could not wait to give the friendly letters and the paper flowers to the residents. One of the kids told me how happy this made them to give back to others. I would recommend having your students create paper flowers and friendly letters for others.
Doing the project with the students went well. The flowers and friendly letters the students made were super cute. The students also really enjoyed creating the gifts for the residents. I had the students create the paper flowers and friendly letters for the residents at the same time. I had to modify the zoom meeting and pictures from the Cheney Care Center. Unfortunately, there was not a time that worked to do the zoom call or pictures with the Cheney Care Center. Therefore, this part of the project did not work. The advice that I would give is that it is okay if everything does not turn out the way you planned it to. If the kids do not get to have the Zoom Call or pictures with the organization, the students will still be impacted by the project because they are still learning to give back to others.
This project went great with my placement students, and they brought in amazing donation items for the shelter animals. Talking about some animals at the shelter who have medical issues and have been there for a while really pulled on the heart strings of some children. I informed them that adopting out animals with lifelong medical needs can be difficult. Also, I made sure students understand that donations can be new or used. Telling students this aspect is important and would be my advice for anyone trying to do the same project, because not everyone has access to buy new donation items.
I thought the project went really well. The kids were super engaged in writing the letters and genuinely enjoyed the process, which was really cool to see. A lot of them took their time on their drawings and really wanted it to be something the soldiers were going to like. Most of the parts of my plan worked well, and I was happy to be able to do it with the whole group of students. There were a couple kids that I had to modify things for a little bit because they struggle with their writing, so they had to trace the letters that we wrote for them. It was good though because we still got to see their handwriting over ours. Another aspect of it that I would have liked to be more prepared for was introducing the topic and explaining the “why” of it all to the kids a little better. I would tell anyone that was trying to do this same project to allow your students to write whatever they want for the letter if you are in an upper grade level. Since I did this with a kindergarten class, it was a little bit harder to do this.
The project went really well! The students gathering supplies over the whole month of February worked great because it gave lots of time for students to get the information to parents/guardians and get the supplies back to the school. If I had more time I would try and plan a field trip to spokanimal for the students to visibly see the worker’s gratitude when delivering the supplies.