Giving Thursday #4: School Kits for Church World Service--They're asking for it!

As part of our participation in Big Hearted Families, we continued our "experiment" with another "Giving Thursday."

This past Thursday we embarked on a slightly more costly activity and packed school kits for Church World Service.


He wanted to make it educational :)

She loved that it was pink

The kids really enjoyed decorating the bags (especially with the iron-on decorations) and were able to get a bit of a sense of how it is for kids across the world who don't have the ability to grab the school supply list and spend fun time (well, sometimes it's fun) in the store choosing what color notebooks they want this year.

However, I think the highlight of the night came when exhausted from the day, I asked them if they wanted to do Giving Thursday on Friday instead.  They immediately got the "that's not fair" expression on their faces and said, "No!  We want to do it today!"  When I asked Megan why she liked GT, she said, "Because I like giving things to people and helping them."  Not bad for four weeks into the experiment...hopefully their enthusiasm continues.

Here are some more details for our fourth GT:

Intro/education:  Heart to Heart video by Church World Services--shows the path of their kits from packing to unpacking with the recipients across the world.

Guidelines for activity:  CWS website

Reflection/extension:

• Discussion around the following questions
• Why do you like having new school supplies?
• What would it feel like if you weren't able to get them
• Reference to a book from Doing Good Together's Kinder Book Club which Tyler really liked when we borrowed it from the library a couple of months ago--One Hen, How One Small Loan Made a Difference