Kindergarten Project to Help the Homeless
April 1, 2015 by
In the Gan Tmarim class, we are learning about people who are homeless. When we learned that homeless people may not have a job, money, clothes, food or toys, we were surprised and sad. To learn more, we read a book about a girl who lives in a shelter and doesn’t have any toys, so she uses her imagination instead. We also saw a play at Imagination Stage about two children who go to sleep and use their imaginations to turn their room into a wonderland where they can turn things “inside out.”
We wanted to use our imaginations to understand and help. We made a “Research Museum” to display what we learned. Sam made a paper airport to represent not being able to travel. Another group found materials that looked shiny like a refrigerator. They drew one empty refrigerator and one full, representing that sometimes people have a lot of food and sometimes people have no food. Using our imagination and sharing stories makes us happy. “You don’t need anything to pretend – we can all use our minds,” one student said.
We plan to send “imagination boxes” to children who live in shelters to make them happy. We will send a book about using your imagination, some materials to pretend with, and a postcard that we will ask the children to send back to us to share how they felt to get a package. One child said, “Let people who are homeless speak for themselves… instead of us speaking for them.”
