Kids Who Care

Spotlight on:

Montgomery Upper Middle School
Skillman, NJ

Grades 6—8

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Montgomery Upper Middle School students care about:

Strengthening bonds between people and
halting the spread of malaria

Students at Montgomery Upper Middle School enjoy “thinking out of the box.” That facility has helped them enormously in crafting some highly original approaches to service.  For example, the Internet is often construed as an impersonal agent of communication. To counter that image, students in a seventh-grade Web Design class purposely created a service project that would “humanize” Web design. How?  The “Gift Web Sites” project was their answer.  For the holiday season, all students in this class were given the opportunity to create a Web site for members of their families.  Some of the information on these Web sites included a student’s family tree, information about their heritage, family and student photos and student stories.  A goal of this project was to help the students see how something that typically tends to isolate people can be used to strengthen bonds. The responses from both the givers and the recipients were overwhelmingly positive.  Students approached the project wholeheartedly and were eager to share their masterpieces with one another (a great deal of cooperative learning took place during the construction stage when everybody appeared to be helping one another to overcome glitches). The recipients were delighted with their gift and praised the students, the teacher, and the school for making such a wise choice of technology!

If the “Gift Web Sites” project changed the heart, the next project the students designed aimed at changing the world or, at least, a global problem.  When science teacher Jamie Witsen introduced her seventh-grade science students to the horrors of malaria, horrors that could be prevented by supplying mosquito nets to African communities, the students immediately went into the action mode.  The students first learned about African history and culture and how malaria has devastated the population. Joining hands with two Paterson schools, John F. Kennedy High School (its honors biology students gave them a scientific lesson via ITV) and Alexander Hamilton Academy (its students addressed the issue at a level appropriate for its K—8 student body), they adopted a plan of action that would raise awareness of malaria and launch a fundraising campaign. The project brought with it many positive results.  The obvious one was that it benefited the African communities that received the nets, and it saved many lives. The educational advantages were also visible: students thoroughly learned the subject matter and further honed their presentation skills in addressing the community. A great social and person benefit was that students from different demographics and grade levels met each other, got to know each other, and discovered they could work together for a common cause. 

One eighth-grade student said, 

“I really liked going to Paterson and meeting kids I never would meet otherwise.”

When Montgomery’s service-learning coordinator Margaret Weinberger saw how the students from such different backgrounds were interacting with one another and how they had united for a humanitarian cause, she said,

“This is the best proof we have that service-learning really works.”

 

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Get these lesson plans:

• “Gift Web Sites”
  
  Core Ethical Values addressed: Citizenship, caring, respect
  
  Curriculum Connections:  Language Arts; Technology; Consumer, Family, and Life Skills
  
  
• “Malaria Project”
  
  Core Ethical Values addressed:  Citizenship, respect, caring, responsibility
  
  Curriculum Connections:  Health Ed.; Science; Social Studies