Past projects 3
Crafting for Kindness
Funded Oct 3, 2024Thank you so much for funding our community outreach project. By purchasing these supplies we are able to start our construction of the items that will hopefully be of some comfort to families of our most vulnerable community members. We have many groups participating in crafting these items.
As a result, we were able to form a relationship with two local outreaches (NY Milk Bank & NYC Chapter of Project Linus) who will be of great assistance with ensuring these items will find their way to their intended owners. Our groups are focusing on one of two skills that they have chosen to learn.
One group is learning sewing skills and have made sets of fabric bonding hearts for families of babies in the NICU. These hearts are intended to be worn by a family member to absorb their scent, so they can leave a piece of themselves with their baby at the hospital. These hearts have also been known to help nursing mothers continue to produce when separated from their babies, if the hearts are used to absorb baby's scent and left with mom. This is why we have chosen to package them in sets of 2.
The other group is learning knit and crochet skills. These students are tasked with making toy octopi/jellyfish to provide comfort and help calm babies, and have also been shown to potentially improve their breathing and heart rate. Some of our more experienced crochet and knitters are making blankets that can be given to "provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children who are seriously ill, traumatized, or otherwise in need through the gifts of new handmade blankets and afghans, lovingly created by volunteer "blanketeers.""
Our students have experince confidence with their newfound skills and can't wait until these items can be sent out to provide comfort to families in need.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Pascucci
This classroom project was brought to life by The Allstate Foundation.Crafting for Kindness
Funded Aug 9, 2022Thank you for your generosity.
The past few years have taken a toll on all of us and the students involved in this group have greatly benefitted from the materials your donations were able to provide. These students were overwhelmed and very grateful and could not wait to start to learn how to crochet.
We started with the basics and they were able to select their own colors to make friendship bracelets by practicing crochet chains. They are excited to learn more stitches and create new projects. They also created suncatchers including words & images that mean something to them.
In a few weeks we will begin discussion of what they want our fundraiser to look like this year. Thank you for your continued support.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Pascucci
This classroom project was brought to life by Bill Gates and 4 other donors.Virtual Lab Experiments
Funded Nov 27, 2020With this year's school climate, so many things that I usually take for granted were not accessible for me to use with my students. The reduction in paper use, the inibility to share materials and the need for social distancing made group work next to impossible. As a science teacher I rely on hands on experiences to get my students excited about scientific concepts. I was at a loss for how I could share a tactile lab experience with students who were only allowed to touch a computer.
Finding ExploreLearning and their Gizmo programs was a gift. Here my students could adjust and interact with a virtual lab assessment rather than passively watching a video and responding to questions. The variety of assessment available was amazing as well because for some topics I just needed them to interact with the manipulative but for others there were self-graded multiple choice and even Google Doc formatted Lab Reports.
This program appealed to me as a teacher but also had a positive response from my students. Below I will share with you some of their experiences in their own words. For reference I teach 8th grade General Science and Honors Biological Sciences.
Daniel - "Using Explore Learning: Gizmos during remote learning was helpful because it made it so we could still do labs in a remote setting by giving us digital labs. It also made it so we could do labs we would otherwise not be able to do in regular in person learning because those labs would have material to hard to get or would be dangerous to do in person. It also makes cleanup easy because there are no tools and materials to put away, just a tab you have to close."
Sherlyn - "Explore Learning: Gizmos has helped me during Remote Learning in Science this year because it helped me understand things better, especially since I'm a visual learner. I was able to get the experience of doing a lab virtually which kind of made up for the fact that I couldn't experience one in person this year. It also helped me understand the lessons better because each lab related to what we were learning about that week. In the process of doing the lab, it explains things to you and why something changed the way it did, which is very helpful."
Jacob - "Gizmo learning has helped with remote because with the program it allows me to control how things work which helps me see things better."
Zarni - "Is very useful tools for this time for us because base with science we can't see whole year changes with our eyes and to these those kind of stuff is very hard to find them online. It just make it so much easy for both teachers and student. I rather use them instead of doing my own research not because I'm lazy is because is very detail and useful"
Vanessa - "Using Explore Learning: Gizmos, has helped me a lot during remote learning. Since we can't do labs because we're not in-person, the gizmos help me a lot with understanding the topic we're learning as well as help me with the 100 hours of labs. It's killing two birds with one stone, so I'm really grateful we get to use Gizmo's this year."”
With gratitude,
Ms. Pascucci
This classroom project was brought to life by Con Edison and 14 other donors.