At first Mr Walker had said we were going to do a litter pick for our active citizens. But then some of us suggested what would be an even better and worth wile thing to do would be to collect food for our annual Christmas hampers for our elderly citizens. We know that many of them are on their own, and often never see anyone.
Whilst carrying out this task we had to organize how we were going to carry out the hamper collection, as a class we came up with some ideas: -
- Tell people in assembly about the hamper project.
- Ask friends and people at home to take part and help
- Write a letter to the head teacher to help us with the hamper collection as well
The next step was to decorate the boxes to a show the elderly that we care and then we had to make sure each box contained an equal amount of food and also an equal amount of variety of food as the other boxes.
Whilst carrying out this project my task was to go to forms G1 and G2 in year seven, to tell them about the hamper collection, I went to these to forms with a classmate everyday for a week and a half at registration time
After decorating the boxes we had to get a list of senior citizens who would appreciate receiving food from us. We decided to do this by asking family and friends firstly and then put a message in the bulletin asking all students to the name of someone. The response we received was excellent as we very quickly had thirty-three names to go with our hampers, which we had collected.
From here we organised the booking of the school bus for two days to deliver the hampers the hampers and several of us took part in delivering the hampers. It was a very moving experience to see the expressions and gratitude of many of our senior citizens we learned a valuable lesson about the joy of doing something for nothing.
After we returned from the Christmas holidays we were pleased to receive letter from some of the elderly who received hampers, this made our efforts worth wile and we were very glad we had chosen to do this citizenship project. We learned a lot from it, we learned that any project needs planning and organisation, it need co-operation so everyone knows what their task is. We believe by doing this project we may encourage others in the school to stop and think about those who need help and hopefully do something for them. We hope that students will follow our example and we know that it has already had a positive effect on others.
If we did this project again I would consider time-management, as we needed more time to plan and organise such a huge task. We hope to pass on what we did to other year groups to continue this emotional and worth wile project. Hopefully some of us will take our ideas into our communities as we get older and try t0o make a difference. I will certainly try to do something else in the local area. This experience was invaluable and taught how to get help from different bodies.
I enjoyed taking part in this project a lot even though I had to spend some of my free time going to other classes to tell them about the hampers. I also enjoyed working in a group as we all got on well, and we all listened to other people ideas and therefore made the project better, whilst working in a group we did not argue either.
