Many years ago, I had the idea to start recess and lunchtime activities at a school I was working at that created linkages with the local community. I didn’t have any connections to begin with, so any idea had to be pretty grassroots.
The first idea started with a whole bunch of loom bands that were donated to the school. I had never used loom bands before, so I learnt how to make a simple bracelet off YouTube.
I would gather supplies, loombands and a jar and pop them on the concrete in the school yard. Children would flock, mostly in Grades 3-6 to investigate. Many students were making loom band bracelets at home and they were keen to show their speed and skills in making them. Pretty quickly, students became leaders and teachers. As new children came every single time, these skilled students would once again be teaching more and more students how to create a loom band bracelet.
This activity supported student confidence, leadership development, creativity, social skills, sharing, patience and resilience when your hand got sore from the elastic bands. It was a pretty amazing site to see, and I felt pretty privileged to see how invested they all were.
So, one day I presented a question, who could we give these to? Who would love a loom band bracelet and how it could possibly impact another person? The first year doing this, one of the students suggested we should give them to sick children. Brilliant I said out loud, internally I was a bit unsure of how we could do this. We were in a regional area of Victoria, yes there was a hospital, but I wasn’t sure how big the paediatric unit would be. Considering I posed the question and the students unanimously voted for sick children, it was my job to contact the hospital. I made a contact, and they suggested a small group of students come into the children's ward to drop off the gifts. Students got busy writing cards and tying them to the loom band bracelets. Students were making these even at home, they wanted every child in the hospital to have one.
Then one day, on an afternoon, around 4 students, myself and a teacher gathered in a vehicle headed to the hospital. In a shocking twist, a student at the school was admitted to hospital on the day we were there handing out the loom band bracelet gifts.
It’s a very small thing, a loom band bracelet, but the whole process was beneficial for the students. They connected with each other, developed their ideas, invested their time and skills into this, and then gave them all away to other children going through a challenging time. This was an opportunity for children to lead, grow, learn and be empowered to make a change and impact in their own community.
So, what have you got? What is something really simple you could use to connect the students in your school to their local community? How could you use a recess and/or lunch activity to bring change and connection to your community?