York Town News
The power of art and of the written word
By Jennifer L. Saunders
Third- and fourth-grade students at Coastal Ridge Elementary School, pictured here, recently completed a true labor of love while learning about their state and themselves. The students created picture books for children in Kenya to help support the Kenya School Project.
Photos by Mary Zane
YORK VILLAGE - With just two weeks left in the school year, it is a time of endings and beginnings for students and teachers at Coastal Ridge Elementary School.
For Patty Raitto's fourth-grade class and Sharon Prosser's third-grade class, however, this time of year also marks a time of special accomplishment, after spending months working on artwork and books for children who live thousands of miles away in Kenya.
These two classrooms embarked on service-learning projects focusing on portions of their curriculum - immigration studies for the fourth-graders and Maine animals for the third-graders - while creating artwork and text with their classroom teachers and art teacher Mary Zane.
These projects mark the culmination of almost an entire academic year of efforts to help the children of Kenya.
Earlier in the current school year, the students at Coastal Ridge learned from Zane about Mary Stusek's Kenya School Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving life in Kenya through education and philanthropy.
And so began a wealth of efforts - from creating birdhouses to be auctioned off by the fourth-grade classes for $700 to the Coastal Ridge Kids Cabinet, which is similar to a student council, organizing a school-wide coin drive to raise $679 for the Kenya School Project earlier in the year.
Throughout that time, the students in Raitto's and Prosser's classrooms were at work researching the subjects for their stories, creating artwork with Zane and ultimately compiling unique books to be sent to the children of Kenya.
Raitto, who served as Service-Learning coordinator for the York School Department when she first came to the district four years ago, and remains active as the Coastal Ridge Service-Learning representative, explained that she and Prosser began the project back in November and December with a presentation to get their students thinking about life in the area around Mt. Kenya in Africa, and how their lives are different from - and similar to - those of the children in Kenya.
"We really wanted to highlight the commonality, the human piece," Raitto said.
The students began thinking about what they could do to help children in a community so far away, where books and school texts are almost a luxury and not something commonly found in classrooms like those of Coastal Ridge.
The third-grade students decided to create picture fanbooks based on their study of Maine animals, and the fourth-graders each researched a character, based on their family trees, taking on the role of that character to create a first-person story told with words and pictures in an accordion book.
"It has been a pleasure," Prosser said of working with her colleagues and students on the effort.
As the third-grade curriculum includes the study of Maine animals, her class came up with the idea of creating books about those animals, while also learning a bit about the animals that would be familiar to the children of Kenya.
"Africa has such unique animals," Prosser said, explaining that she and her students realized they would find Maine's animals unique if they lived in Kenya.
After all that research, Prosser and Raitto explained, the challenge for their students became to convey the wealth of information they found in the form of a picture book.
"They really had to make some tough choices," Raitto said.
Prosser agreed.
"They needed a brief description that would be more accessible to the children," she explained, as the students in Kenya would be using these books to begin to learn English.
While the teachers worked with their students on the texts, Zane spent time during art classes to help them illustrate, create and decorate their books.
"I chose to do the bat because I thought it would be fun because I was going to learn some new facts," said Sam Tufts, a student in Prosser's class. "I also thought the children in Kenya would be interested because they have fruit bats."
Students from both classes said they felt they were making a difference.
"It made me feel pretty good to help them understand what animals we have here and how they're different from what they have in their country," Sam said.
His classmate Devon Datsis chose the white-tailed deer to study because she is interested in the outdoors and thought the children of Kenya would be interested to learn of similarities between the deer and the antelope.
She said she learned a lot in the process, and was happy to help others.
"They don't have a lot of books there, so it feels good to help," she said.
Fourth-graders David Berlin, Casey Moaratty and Conor Tully agreed.
"I felt good that I'm helping someone learn to read," David said.
Conor said he and his classmates put a lot of work into their accordion books, studying about their ancestors and creating a story for children who are just learning to read in English.
"You get to be a different person in the story," he said, explaining he was able to learn about his heritage, and then had to choose words carefully when writing the story to make sure they were words the students would understand.
Casey said her favorite part was "being able to write a story and know that it's actually helping someone."
All three said they want to keep helping others in the future.
"I think they will feel that someone really cares," David said.
Both Raitto and Prosser praised Zane for bringing an opportunity to the students to reach beyond their school - and national - borders to help others as part of their curriculum.
For her part, Zane's focus was on the work of the students, and her appreciation for her colleagues in matching their work on the curriculum to a project to help others.
For all those involved, it appears the gift was definitely in the giving.
"I don't think there's any way you can improve upon the feeling the children get when they're doing something for children in another part of the world," Prosser said.
To learn more about the Kenya School Project, visit http://www.kenyaschoolproject.org/.
