Getting Ready

Today was a very busy day spent getting ready for our trip to The Downtown Mission tomorrow. We want each child to be able to personally deliver a bag of food when we get off the bus, so we spent time decorating bags with pictures and words showing support.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next job was for each child to choose three items to put in their bag. This way when we do our grand count tomorrow we know exactly how many items we've already bagged. This also proved to be a good exercise in math as the children needed to count the items and then try and fit them together in the bag. They had to choose 'just right' sizes in order to make the items all fit.

 

Our final job was organizing the remaining items so that the boxes weren't overloaded and would be easy to transport tomorrow!

 

Little Acorns Grow into Mighty Oaks

Your support for our children and the Downtown Mission continues! Thank you! Thank you! We again had a large number of food items arrive to school today with the children.

 

We've been using math strategies from throughout our work this year to help us calculate how many items arrive at school each day. The children know they can count each item one by one, but that also takes a very long time when you are working with big numbers.

 

Today the children wanted to organize the items in groups of 13. They knew that 13 wasn't a 'friendly' number like 5, 10 or even 20 and would be an excellent challenge for us!

 

 

Many of our students mentally calculated the items and our grand total for today was 64! We added this information to our ongoing tally.

It was exciting to bring the food items down to the front of the school...

...and add these to our already huge collection of donations!

 

We were also touched to learn that Mr. Roger Chauvin at the Windsor Essex County Canoe Club was working with his members to raise money for The Mission. We wrote an email to him sharing what we were doing in our classroom. Our children were amazed at the number of people in our community that wanted to help. Mr. Chauvin wrote an email right back to us. 

What a wonderful message of support to show our children that their work is touching people in positive ways and changing their community for the better. We wrote back to Mr. Chauvin. 

Our children are growing into those mighty oaks of which Mr. Chauvin spoke so eloquently. We are so privileged to be a witness to this. 

Kindergarteners Building Community - one can at a time.

"Help young people. Help small guys. Because small guys will be big. Young people have the seeds you bury in their minds, and when they grow up, they will change the world." --Jack Ma

Families, as you may recall our children successfully donated hundreds of food items to our school wide food drive in December. 

We were disheartened to learn this weekend from our local newspaper that the Downtown Mission is in desperate need of food. 

We discussed the article with the children at circle time.  Our children were quite moved and immediately began to offer suggestions for ways to help. 

We created an idea web to help organize our thinking. We were amazed at the depths of thinking and far reaching ideas the children had. They began with wanting to collect items in our classroom and then moved to involving the entire school and then community! They thought of using posters, social media, print and public speaking to share their message and vision for helping out the Mission. 

Many of the children's ideas included encouraging others in our school and community to consider donating. They worked carefully to craft posters that would help inspire others to donate. Our children became empowered agents of social change. 

We wrote a letter and presented it to Mrs. Tullio. We wanted to know her thoughts regarding our ideas and how we could proceed with including the whole school in our plan. 

Please help. We will welcome food items into our classroom and will ensure they are donated to the Mission. Please engage in discussions with your child about this important endeavour and commend their empathetic and generous participation. Please stay tuned - some of our children's ideas are big and we want to help them change the world! We can't wait to see where this journey takes us!