Food Pantry & Food Drive

One way we decided to help others as the school year is coming to a close is to run a building-wide food drive.

To prepare for the food drive, we walked to our community's food pantry for a tour and a peek at how things work.  One of our district employees is on the board at the food pantry, and she was gracious enough to lead the tour.  Prior to our visit, students created a list of questions they wanted to get answers to on our visit.  2 students volunteered to be our note-takers at the food pantry and 2 kiddos were our "official" photographers on our trip.

Students were immediately excited to see the freezer with ice cream in it and a volunteer who showed them the forklift in action.

After learning about how the food pantry works and what their needs are, we set to work organizing our food drive.  A couple classrooms allowed students to visit and share what we learned.  A group of students created an iMovie movie trailer to share their knowledge of the food pantry with others.  Our last group created the flyer to send home to all students explaining our food drive.

We were learning about measurement in math, so we put our measurement skills to work to decide how to set a goal for our food collection.  We decided that weight was a better idea than length.  We set a goal of 400 pounds of food since we have just over 400 students in our building.

Our food drive ran for a week.  It was shared via our school district's social media pages as well as in our local newspaper's "chalkboard chatter" section.  At the end of the week, we weighed the food collected and sorted it into groups because the kids wanted to count how many items we had too.

We are happy to report that we collected 413 pounds of food!  My kiddos were so excited to meet our goal and help others in our community!

The final part of our project was a representative from the food pantry coming to pick up the food.  5 of the kids helped him load our collection into his vehicle.  He made it fun for them by allowing them to ride on the cart on the way back up the hallway.  They couldn't get enough of it!

This was a great project for a class and was well-supported by families.  My kiddos have looked forward to helping others throughout this year.  I hope it is something that they will want to do in the future as well!