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Edited on Fri Dec-08-06 03:20 PM by calimary
school? Or is there a youth group in your church (if you're involved with a local church in some way, that is)? If not, could you start one? The elementary school from which both my kids have now graduated didn't have a recycling program until some mother cared enough to get the ball rolling. Now it's a flourishing group that involves every grade, all the kids, and their parents.
You can get really wild and crazy and creative with this, too, if you wanna take it and run with it. Here's a really fun, cool, and profitable thing we did, to give you some ideas. We partnered with that recycling group at the school for several years when this one particular mother was chair of the school carnival (one of the two big annual school fundraisers). She wanted the most money possible to go to the school and to cut expenses as shrewdly as possible to contribute to that. She was big on recycling and environmental responsibility anyway, and she knew I was an artist and crafter and that I sometimes taught craft classes for kids. So she asked if, instead of buying carnival decorations, WE could make our own - and incorporate recycling into it somehow.
Well, we did. Every Friday, we had an after-school carnival crafting session. "Crafter-School," we called it. Every week, for six weeks leading up to the carnival, we had a special project to work on, and it was in keeping with the theme of the carnival that year. We determined what we would be making every week, and then we put out a bulliten in the regular bulliten/announcement packet that went out every week - announcing the project to come, and what we'd like to use for it. That meant - what recyclables we'd be using. Which meant - what recyclables we'd like the rest of the student body to collect and bring in. For example, the year of the "Cosmic Carnival" (outer space theme), we spent one Friday making rockets. So the week before, we announced that we'd be needing all the CLEANED-OUT 2-liter plastic bottles and other plastic bottles, lids, soda can pull tabs, whatevers, that people could bring in. They did. We had oodles of 30-gallon trash can liners FULL of recyclables. Art supplies and glue and scissors and scotch tape and pipe cleaners and stuff you'd embellish these bottles with - were donated by a couple of nice moms. Then we'd set to work for two hours after school on Friday and do it. Furthermore, no child was allowed to turn in a project unless his/her name was prominently placed on it (so everyone would know whom to applaud). That was VERY important. The kids came, with their moms. They couldn't wait. They buzzed about it all week. All week I went "dumpster diving" through all the trash and recyclables turned in. We had TONS of stuff to work with. More and more increasingly excited, enthusiastic kids week by week. They were taking extra stuff home to work on extra rockets over the weekend. They were bringing in their own finished products for inspection and accolades. They were bubbling over with excitement, which in turn built up excitement about the carnival (everybody eager to go, more money spent, more money raised for the school). And the next week, we asked for plastic yogurt cups and laundry soap boxes and toilet paper tubes. Those were to use for making robots in the next round. Another week, we asked for soda can pull tabs, soda cans, cardboard, those plastic things that hold six-packs, and lids. LOTS of plastic and screw-on lids. Those would then create space ship "control panels" to be mounted on all the game and food and ticket and ride booths. Then we called for all the old newspaper and magazines we could get - for a grand finale papier mache "slop fest" - with balloons on which we would put the papier mache. Those, over the final two weeks, became planets, suns, stars, and moons, to be painted, glittered, glued, spangled, whatever. When some kid was finished, we then made a huge deal out of it, interrupting the session and demanding everyone's attention. We'd hold up whatever work of art it was, proclaim loudly who'd done it and how wonderful it was, drawing attention to some technique or neat thing about the work, and inviting equally loud cheers and applause. Everybody loved it, and they all got into the spirit of it.
Everything, properly festooned with each young crafter's name, was hung up, mounted, or otherwise prominently displayed all over the carnival grounds, turning the whole place into a sort of open-air art gallery - all created by the kids (AND their parents - who also shared the accellerating excitement every week, and wanted to join in the fun, for themselves). At the end, there wasn't a kid on campus who wasn't eager to take home all of his/her creations, and fretted when one was temporarily misplaced. All day long, you could see excited kids dragging some adult over to some special spot on the carnival grounds to show the adult what they'd made.
And every year, we paid homage to a different theme. The year of the "Jungle Jam" we did all animal/bugs/reptile-type stuff, up to and including the grand finale two-week wrap-up project, using donated wooden sawhorses from a local construction company - which then became animal bodies for the kid-crafters, who used those papier mache balloons not for planets this time, but for animal heads. Wild ones of their own devising. The year of the "Underwater World" carnival, we turned those lidded styrofoam take-out boxes into clams, paper towel tubes and plastic margarine tubs into octopi, streamers, ribbons, and pie plates into jellyfish (did you know egg carton segments make very good bulged-out eyeballs?), among other critters. We went nuts. NO idea was too outlandish or ridiculous or impossible. Like they say in NPR, "All Things Considered."
We DID save money that would otherwise have been spent buying or renting decorations. The kids had a WHALE of a good time being wildly creative - outside the confines of some fairly restrictive scheduled art classes. The moms and an occasional dad got more involved, and made stuff, too, and had a great time. We had LOTS AND LOTS of fun every week. We made the craziest, wildest, nuttiest, silliest, most ingenious stuff, and our craft sessions grew bigger and better-attended every week. By the time the carnival actually happened, people were worked up into a FRENZY, and we absolutely KILLED in the fundraising department by the time it was all over. The best and most successful series of carnivals EVER. And most lucrative for the school. And what was even more fun for me was that for the rest of the year, kids kept coming up to me (and their moms, too), and talking about it, asking what the theme was for next year and what we were going to be making, and when it was going to start. They couldn't wait. And as soon as I stepped on campus the following September, they were all over me wanting to know when we'd get started. When that carnival chair moved on (her daughter graduated, and in effect, so did she), the next carnival chair made changes and did it other ways, and we didn't have any further recycling carnival crafting. Nevertheless, I STILL had kids coming up to me asking if we were gonna do it this year, or next year, what the theme was, could they make stuff. And many of them expressed regret that we weren't doing the crafting anymore, and how they missed it. Kids I worked with as kindergarteners, by the time I left when they were in maybe fifth grade, were STILL talking about it, how much fun they had, how cool it had been, and how they STILL had the things they made, at home in their rooms. Moms still talked about it, too, and expressed great appreciation. For some of the kids, it changed their minds about art (art can be FUN!), and encouraged them to pursue it on their own. And you would be FLOORED by what they came up with, in ideas, stylings, AND execution.
My point here after all that long-winded blah-blah-blah is that, with a little creativity, you can REALLY start something. You can stir things up, and stir people up. Get them involved, excited, and busy, and they WILL do the rest. And you will get some VERY nice residual benefits for YOUR objective - very likely far more than you dared hope. Don't be afraid the idea might be silly. If it's a grade school, the kids will LOVE silly. They'll hunger for it. The sillier the better. The dividends are beyond belief.
Like, if some sort of involvement through your kid's school is a realistic option available to you, use your imagination to figure up some fundraiser for the local shelter - ESPECIALLY if it's like some we have here in L.A. that cater to women and girls - pregnant-unmarried-etc. Could you do an art gallery type thing? Maybe put on a show? Maybe a song contest or talent show or pie-eating contest or car wash or something? I found that if it was silly and maybe even a little bit messy, it went over like gangbusters. The kids loved it. It gave them a chance to let their hair down. The teachers liked it. The principal tolerated the temporary mess (which we always meticulously cleaned up) and LOVED the financial windfall for the school. The community service aspect fed everyone's souls and morales, and everybody won. The objective is to figure out what can be done in which EVERYBODY WINS. EVERYBODY BENEFITS. EVERYBODY HAS A GREAT TIME. EVERYBODY LAUGHS A LOT AND LETS LOOSE A LITTLE. And it just winds up being frickin' FABULOUS. It will cost you time and energy. And by the time you're into it, you probably won't even care. And you'll have accomplished something great, taught the kids about involvement and growing their own creativity and then channeling it into something positive and wildly original for the benefit of a greater need. Plus, it will wind up being GREAT fun.
Pssssst: One more thing - they'll all think you're a GENIUS!
Shit - sorry this is so long.
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