At the end of each month, one class or grade at Wesley leads the effort to raise funds or collect items to help a charity in our local or global community. This event is called “Care & Share Day”. Wesley students are allowed to wear “casual clothes” on Care & Share Day in exchange for loonies and toonies or requested items (e.g. non-perishable food item for a food pantry, shoeboxes full of school supplies and Christmas gifts for less fortunate children, etc). Different charities are chosen to represent diverse projects in order to give our students awareness of local and global needs and to help them realize that effort from children and youth make a difference. More importantly, we want to encourage them to participate with a loving and servant heart.
At the end of September, our Grade 7 class introduced the students in the elementary chapel service to the 105 Challenge for the 105 Gibson Centre Food Bank. Each class was tasked with bringing 105 or more non-perishable items for people in need in our community. Some of our classes are small with only 13 students but every class was willing to try to meet this goal. Officially, students brought in items from Monday, September 25 to Thursday, September 28th. By the time our weekly newsletter to parents went out on Friday the 29th, our total count was 2183. However, items continued to trickle in until Wednesday, October 4th, when the boxes were finally loaded for delivery to the 105 Gibson Centre!
This morning, two of our Grade 7 representatives shared amazing news with our students at chapel service. As a school, we collected 2386 items, which averages about 108 items for each of our 22 classes. This is an impressive number and it exceeded our goal of 105 items per class. We give God the glory for this accomplishment!
Many teachers, especially those in our Early Learning Centre, used this challenge as a valuable teaching exercise not only as way to serve and show God’s love to others but also as math lessons!
Students practiced counting, grouping and sorting skills. One of our JK classes even made a special poster that showed donations in intervals of 5, encouraging them to skip count!
We would like to thank all our Wesley families, teachers and staff who participated in this food drive for 105 Gibson. We would also like to recognize Mr. Dan Foreman, one of our parent volunteers, who loaded all the heavy boxes onto his truck and delivered them to the centre. Most of all, we thank God for the privilege of teaching our students to love our neighbours and to be His hands and feet to those around us.