Schoolkids Host ‘Alex’s Lemonade Stands,’ Fight Childhood Cancer

A group of students at Ralston Middle School in Belmont, California, literally turned lemons into lemonade. The students, who are members of Ralston’s student government, sold lemonade to raise money for Alex's Lemonade Stand, an organization that supports children afflicted by cancer. [see video above]

At Garnet Valley Elementary School in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, students ran an Alex’s Lemonade Stand event. They sold more than 1,000 cups of lemonade and raised $370. [read more]

One day last October, third-graders at Prairie Ridge Elementary School in Shawnee, Kansas, sold lemonade and cookies for 50 cents apiece. Their lunchtime effort ended up raising $1,303 for Alex’s Lemonade Foundation. The event helped students learn about childhood cancer, empathy, and how they each have the power to make a difference by overcoming obstacles they face in life, said teacher Brandi Leggett. [read more]

Last fall, members of the Key Club at Summer Creek High School in Houston hosted a lemonade stand at a local Chick-fil-A restaurant. They were so excited with the results that they set up another stand a couple weeks later at a Friday night football game. [read more]

Kathy Andrade’s second-graders at Our Lady of the Assumption/Holy Family School in Fairfield, Connecticut, have set up lemonade stands since 2008 to support the efforts of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation. The monthly lemonade functions raised more than $2,000 last year. [read more]

ALEX HAD A PLAN

Those are just a handful of hundreds of stories of schoolkids who have followed in the footsteps of a young girl named Alexandra (“Alex”) Scott.

When Alex was just four years old, she told her parents she wanted to set up a front-yard lemonade stand. Her plan: to give the money to doctors to help them find a cure for the cancer she had lived with since she was a year old. Her first “Alex’s Lemonade Stand” raised an astonishing $2,000 in one day. While bravely fighting her own cancer, Alex continued to set up lemonade stands every year. As news spread, people everywhere were inspired to start their own lemonade stands -- donating the proceeds to her cause. By the time Alex passed away at the age of eight, her stand and inspiration had raised more than $1 million towards finding a cure for the disease that took her life.

Alex's legacy lives on in Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, established by her parents in 2005. Since its inception, the Foundation has raised more than $40 million to fund more than 150 cutting-edge research projects; create a travel program to help support families of children receiving treatment; and develop resources to help people everywhere affected by childhood cancer.

NEW SERVICE-LEARNING RESOURCES FOR SCHOOLS

At Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, staff members know that young people can make a big difference. They saw it in Alex, and they continue to see it everyday as children hold fundraisers to keep Alex's dream of a cure alive. To support teachers and students, the Foundation team has created many resources to help teach important lessons about giving and to empower students to act.

“We want your school's experience to be rewarding for students, staff, and the entire community,” says the Foundation’s Connie Funston, “so we are proud to introduce our exciting new service-learning program, which aims to teach Alex’s inspiring message of making a difference, helping others, and overcoming obstacles.”

The curriculum comprises three units each for Grades K-1, 2-3, and 4-5 and was developed with emphasis on enhancing the literacy skills of children while teaching them about the “Power of One.” It is also geared towards reinforcing key lessons from the Foundation’s children’s book, Alex & the Amazing Lemonade Stand. Lesson plans include supplemental handouts as well as special instructions for English-as-a-second-language learners, struggling learners, and gift-and-talented students. For teachers new to service-learning, materials explaining this method of teaching are also included.

Funston encourages anyone interested in creating an Alex's Lemonade Stand fundraising event in their school community to spend some time checking out these resources the site has to offer:
Lemonade from Lemons Service-Learning Program
Hold a Stand at Your School (and Other Fundraising Ideas)
Lesson Plans for Teachers
Schools & Service-Learning: Downloads
Request a Copy of the Book: Alex and the Amazing Lemonade Stand
Discussion Points
Getting Involved: Ways to Fundraise
Get Your School Involved: Register Now

Calling all kids across this great land!
You can help kids with your own lemonade stand.
As Alex once said,
“It’s easy and it’s fun.”
You need lemonade, ice, and a little bit of sun.
The money you raise can help kids who are sick.
A cure might be found, perhaps even quick!

Is Your School's Food Drive Just Ahead? Check Out Some Fun Ideas!

Many schools run school-wide food drives around the Thanksgiving and December holidays.

Others run them during January, to coincide with the “Souper” Bowl service project. Or in March, as part of the National PTO’s SchoolsServe National School Food Drive.

If your school is planning a food drive for the weeks ahead -- or anytime -- here are some fun ideas you might use.

Stuff the Turkey. If your school’s food drive is held in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, you might theme that effort around a Thanksgiving turkey. Wrap a big barrel in brown craft paper to form the body of a turkey. Put the barrel near a wall and tape a large turkey head and big paper feathers to the wall. Invite students to “stuff the turkey” full of food for your local food bank.

Promote the Food Drive. Besides the usual flyers, you might have local grocery stores provide brown paper bags for students to decorate. In the weeks leading up to the drive, baggers can stuff shopper’s purchases into bags that promote your food drive with free advertising. Another greener way to promote the drive is to create food drive mobiles. Recycle an old grocery bag into a hanging advertisement for the drive; hang from that bag drawings that represent the types of food most needed by your local food bank or soup kitchen. See simple instructions for creating this mobile on Crayola’s Web site at this link: Food Bank Mobile.

Track Your Class. Students might use this November Coloring Calendar to track the number of food items brought in each day. At the end of the drive, have young students answer questions about the number of items contributed on different days and have older students add up the numbers to learn their total contribution. In addition, you might print out the calendar on a sheet of transparency film. Place the transparency on an overhead projector so you can project and trace the image onto a large sheet of craft paper or a bulletin board. This large calendar will serve as a spot where the school-wide contribution totals can be posted and tallied.

Make a Living Graph. When the drive comes to an end, use chalk to draw a large graph grid on an asphalt-covered playground surface. Students can create a bar graph to show the number of contributions (the y axis) brought in each day (the x axis) of the drive. Older students (or the student who contributed the most items from each class) might stand at the x and y coordinates to create a graph that shows school-wide totals day by day. Use a colorful rope to connect the students to create a living line graph. Have someone take pictures or video of the event from a second-floor window or the school roof. Better yet, for some great PR invite a local news photographer or TV station team to report the event.

Food Drive Word Problems. At the end of the drive, use the data collected during the food drive to create a page of math word problems. Create a different set of problems for each grade level, based on the math skills those students have learned in class. Students won’t even realize they are doing math as they solve these real-world problems. See examples of word problems for different grade levels in this Education World lesson plan: Graphing the Annual Food Drive.

READ MORE

Feeding a Community
Scott Elementary School in Naperville, Illinois, plans a food drive each fall (“Thanks and Giving”) and another in the spring (“Children Helping Children”). Click the link above to learn more about this school’s community service efforts.

Successful Canned Food Drive Ideas
This message board on the AtoZ Teacher Stuff site is full of great ideas for educators, from educators.

Service Learning Projects
The Pro Teacher site presents this message board with teacher-contributed ideas that can help students make a difference in their communities.

School Service ProjectsTeach Many Lessons

Whenever I see a news story about kids who are using their energy to do good in their community or for others far away, I always stop to read it. Among the stories I’ve in recent days are these three about projects that are teaching kids the curriculum as they instruct valuable lessons in giving back to their communities and others in need.

A budget crunch in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, has forced the community's public library to cut back its hours of operation. The library is closed on Fridays now, and Saturday hours have been cut back too. News of the cutbacks sent fifth graders in two of the community’s elementary schools into action. Students in Nina Strelec’s art classes designed note cards to sell for the benefit of the library’s children’s department. The students designed cards, carved their designs into linoleum blocks, and printed them. The cards were packaged eight to a bundle and sold for $5. More than 1,000 sets were pre-ordered, and the card packs are also available for sale in the library, where the children’s designs are on display. “I wanted students to understand that they can use their talent as artists to help others,” Strelec told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (read the news story). The project helped students understand the business of art from the creative side to production, assembly, and distribution, she added.

When Massachusetts teacher Andrea Boyko was looking for a unique way to help her third graders in Springfield learn the value of the number 1,000, she came up with the idea of collecting 1,000 quarters to help children half a world away. Boyko has spent many of her school vacations working at schools in Ghana, West Africa. Her experiences there led her to found an organization, Future Leaders of Ghana, which helps children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. The $250 her students raised as part of their math lesson is being used to provide school lunches for kids in those Ghanaian schools. Those students typically don’t get any lunch at all while they are in school, Boyko told the Springfield Republican (read the story). The project turned out to be a real eye-opener for Boyko’s students. They learned that they can barely budge a pile of 1,000 quarters. In addition, their connection to students in Ghana has taught them that, even though many consider themselves to be “poor,” they have much for which they can be grateful.

In Falls Church, Virginia, middle school students in Owlin Burke’s family and consumer sciences classes help to create quilts that provide a sense of safety for children in foster care. The project begins in the school’s geometry classes, where students design quilt patterns. Then students in Burke’s classes choose a design with which they want to work. Many of the students who make quilt squares as part of the class also volunteer their time after school to help assemble the quilts. Besides learning sewing skills, the students are also learning about responsibility for others. “The project gives them an opportunity to give back to the community,” Burke told the Washington Post (read the story).

In school after school, projects such as these involve students in learning as they think about and help others in the community -- or the wider world -- who can benefit from a little time and love.

It’d be great if you could take a moment to share a story from your school or community about students who carried out a project to benefit others as it gave themselves an opportunity to learn and grow. Thank you for adding your comments at the bottom of this blog entry.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Youth Service America
This organization offers ideas and other resources, including grants, for engaging youth ages 5 to 25 years in service to their communities. Their free newsletters are a valuable resource for educators. Click the globe art to the right to learn more about YSA’s Global Youth Service Day, which takes place each April.

Community Service
This Education World archive shares sample projects from teachers who believe that involving students in service projects is an effective strategy for engaging interest in the curriculum and in their communities.

Service-Learning and Community Service in K-12 Public Schools
The National Student Service-Learning and Community Service Survey was designed to measure the extent to which service-learning and community service occur in K-12 public schools. Click the link above to learn the results of that survey.