Today’s post comes from Sandy Warrick, a Scholastic 2010 Be Big Contest winner.

Every school year, I teach students the difference between wants and needs. The children know that people need food, water, clothing and shelter.  Everything else falls into the category of wants.

In 2002, my class and I were talking about having a gift exchange for the holidays. One of my students stated that we were fortunate enough to have everything we needed and asked if we could do something for people that needed something instead of buying things that we wanted.

The class agreed.

They wanted to build a house for someone, but knew they didn’t have the skills to do that!  They considered clothing, but knew there were many places in town providing this service. They decided they wanted to bring in food.  They knew what it felt like to be hungry and couldn’t imagine what it must be like for people who were hungry all the time.

I found out that citizens made generous donations of food to The Storehouse, our local food bank, but the shelves for baby food were always empty.  People do not think about purchasing baby food!  I mentioned this to the children, and they knew immediately this was what they wanted to do.  Every child brought in wrapped jars of baby food, which were delivered to The Storehouse to be given to the hungry infants in our community.

In January, the children asked if they could continue this project.  They knew that babies were not just hungry during the holidays.  One of the boys emphasized, “The babies don’t have a choice.  They are poor because their parents are poor.  We need to feed the babies.”

We set a goal of how many jars we thought we could donate each month. I integrated sorting, counting and graphing jars of food into our math curriculum.  The children were able to collect 750 jars of food that year.  That class wanted to continue collecting food the next year, so they invited new classmates to join us.  We doubled our donation to 1500 jars of baby food.  During the third year of the project, students began writing letters to local businesses.  With business donations, we were able to give 3000 jars of baby food to The Storehouse.  This service learning project continued to flourish at our school.  We were able to donate 6000 jars of food during each of the next four years.

In 2009, donations began to dwindle due to changes in the economy.  My Kindergarten students were concerned about the need to feed the hungry babies.  We decided to write and illustrate a book to share with Kindergarten classrooms in our district.  The children believed that developing an awareness of this problem would generate a solution.

At the same time, I heard about the Scholastic BE BIG In Your Community Contest.  We entered the contest, as our Baby Food Drive exemplified 8 of Clifford’s 10 Big Ideas.  The Baby Food Drive is an excellent and much needed avenue for 5 and 6 year old children to make a huge difference in their community.  The children believed that we would win, but felt that the more important part of entering the contest was to get the word out that we need to feed the hungry babies in our nation.  Now, we are asking for your help!

Hunger in America is a real problem, but one that has an easy fix. If every student donated three jars of baby food each month, we could end infant hunger in America. Adding hunger awareness and service learning opportunities that focus on youth hunger to your lesson plans is easy and has a great pay off for your students and community!