Impact to My Classroom

# of Students Impacted: 12

This grant helped fund breakfast foods for a group of 5th grade students at Eden Park Elementary School who were in a leadership group called "Equipment Managers". At Eden Park Elementary School, we hold various activity groups in the morning to allow the students a chance to get in some physical activity before school. This group of equipment managers help us run these programs that on some days we can have over 100 students come outside. 

We provided the managers with special tshirts and we also held monthly leadership meeting with them. 

The funds from this grant enabled us to make breakfast for them at these meetings. 

Adding this element for our managers this year really had a positive impact. The students were really appreciative of it and I feel it helped them see the importance of their responsibility.

At the meetings we talked about leadership styles and techniques that went along with our 7 Habits program that the school adopted this year and it was an easy bridge for us to use the same language with them. 

Classroom teachers were able to hold the students accountable in their learning and behavior and expressed that is has helped the students academically because they knew we would be contacted if they were not completing homework or had behavior problems. Students did not want to be "kicked out" due to this.

At one meeting we discussed the importance of giving back and the students chose to gave up one of their free fridays a month to sponsor a younger student. They took pride in working with their mentee and the mentees LOVED the extra attention from the older student. 

We were so proud of how our managers were doing we even took them on a mid year trip to see an Everblades Hockey game. 

All in all I feel the funds from this grant really made this group of students feel good. They understood the monies came from a person from the community and that was a real shock to them that someone who didn't know them would care to give. Unfortunely, we did not have our last 3 meetings due to the Covid 19 virus and school closings as well as an end of year trip that we were beginning to plan. 

We are however trying to figure out how to create a group on our school's virtual learning platform of these managers and allowing for some group conversations of how they could still utilize their leadership qualities in this time.