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| Students from Park Village Elementary School having a bake sale. To-wen Tseng/CW Parenting |
**This article was originally published on Flipedu.parenting.com.tw, a Chinese-language website by Taiwan' Commonwealth Parenting Magazine, on Dec 12, 2022. The original article in Chinese can be found here. This is an English translation. **
On a crispy cold morning in early December, four classes of nearly 100 fourth graders, led by their teachers and volunteer parents, walked into two grocery stores in the suburbs of San Diego.
Each classes were divided into six groups with four kids in each group: one scribe, one calculator, a cart loader and a cashier. In one group, as the cart loader loaded the groceries based on the shopping list that the scribe's holding, the calculator reminded her, "You cannot take that organic eggs! That's too expensive."
"He's right!" the scribe agreed, "We can only spend $4.99 on eggs! Just take the ordinary eggs."
"How much money do we still have?" asked the cashier, anxiously. The envelope that she held so tightly in her hand contained $150, including $100 for the groceries and $50 for a gift card. The money was raised by the whole class over the past one month by selling baking goods, hot chocolate, book marks and other art works.
"We've got 25 and a few cents left!" answered the calculator, busy working out his numbers.
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| Children from Park Village Elementary School shopping groceries. To-wen Tseng/CW Parenting |
Solving real problems with project-based learning
This is Park Village Elementary School's Giving Day Project, a long-held holiday tradition at the San Diego elementary school for the school's fourth graders of feeding families in need at neighboring Los Penasquitos Elementary School.
For the past 25 years, the fourth graders at Park Village Elementary kicked off the project with brainstorming for fundraising ideas in early November: Some students "cashed-in" their Halloween candies, some set up stands to sell hot cocoa or lemonades; some hand made bookmarks or holiday cards to sell online.
Parents were also involved: mothers helped their children by making cakes and baking cookies for sale; fathers helped with setting up the stands. In oder to make more money, many students made eye-catching posters and flyers, and distributed them throughout the neighborhood.
After the one-month fundraising period, the funds collected by each classes would be pooled together and evenly distributed among four classes. Based on the budget, the students in each class would design a nutritious meal plan that is enough for the family they "adopted" to eat over the winter break. They then referred to the weekly advertisements from local grocery stories, calculated the cost, made a shopping list, and finally picked a day to shop for foods and gift cards before sending all the goods to Los Penasquitos Elementary.
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| A group of four children carefully going through their shopping list. To-wen Tseng/CW Parenting |
Los Penasquitos Elementary and Park Village Elementary were only nine minutes away from each other, but the environments were quite different. Park Village Elementary School was located in a middle-class residential area, while Los Penasquitos Elementary was next to a low-income housing complex.
According to National Center for Education Statistics, there were about 520 students enrolled in Los Penasquitos Elementary School, and more than 40% of them were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. On the other hand, less than 10% of the 550 students enrolled in Park Village Elementary School were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
Giving Day Project is the largest project-based learning projects for fourth graders at Park Village Elementary. Students applied knowledge in reading, writing, math and social sciences to the project.
Heather Bartlett, a fourth-grade teacher at Park Village Elementary School, wrote on an email to parents,
"This is a unique opportunity for students to take ownership of an important project where they get to see the direct impact of their efforts. It is also a chance for students to understand, firsthand, how many blessings they have."
Seeing the less fortunate, learning to be gratitude
Completing the grocery shopping trip, the group of elementary school students loaded their school buses with bags of food, and took the bus to Los Penasquitos Elementary. In the multi-purpose room of Los Penasquitos, the students from Park Village Elementary sat in rows, and the counselor at Los Penasquitos accepted the donation on behalf of Los Penasquitos families.
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| Ms. Bartlett (woman with mask) and some of the donated food. To-wen Tseng/CW Parenting |
Fran Hjalmarson was the counselor at Los Penasquitos Elementary School. She asked the students, "Kids from Park Village, who has been to the Legoland?"
Almost all the students raised their hands.
Ms. Hjalmarson asked again, "And who has been to the Disneyland?"
About a little more than half of the students raised their hands.
Then Hjalmarson said, "You know what? Here at Los Penasquitos, less than half of the children have been to the Legoland. Very few of them has been to the Disneyland."
Many of the students from Park Village gasped with disbelieving expressions on their young faces.
Hjalmarson has been serving at Los Penasquitos Elementary School for more than 20 years and was the one who assigned each Park Village fourth grade class a family to “adopt.” She told the students that all four adopted families lived in low-income apartments; there was no heater or air conditioning in these apartments.
There was a family of seven living in a small one-bedroom apartment. A single mother walked her 7-year-old to school every day because she didn't have a car. A grandmother taking care of six grandchildren on her own. When the winter came and the free school lunch was not available during the break, these families were often forced to make difficult choices between food and daily expenses such as gas.
Hearing these, the students from Park Village all showed a somewhat uncomfortable expression. Most of them lived in big houses with five bedrooms and three bathrooms. There were fireplaces in their living rooms, swimming pools in the backyards, and two cars in their garages.
"I was just thinking that the groceries were too heavy and I was too tired to carry them!" said one student, "But now I feel very happy. The heavier we carry means the more the families in need get to eat."
"I think we live in a great neighborhood," said another student. "We couldn't do this without the help from our neighbors. The cakes we baked were ugly, the cards we drew were not very good, and the hot cocoa at our stands were more expensive than the Starbucks cocoa, but our neighbors bought all of them anyway!"
Ms. Bartlett said that in the past, the students at Park Village could raise about $700 each class per year. This year the four classes raised a total of $5376, and all the students were very excited.
"We'll continue this tradition next year," she said. "It's a wonderful lesson for our students on giving."
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