How can we best understand another person? Most likely by walking in another person's shoes.... BUT... not everyone has shoes. My 7th grade students always do the "Take a Walk in My Shoe" assignment. It is an assignment to learn basic drawing skills and to also reflect on our lives. We think about where our shoes have taken us in life, what we have seen and experienced along the way, and where we want our shoes to take us in the future. Sometimes we misstep and have to take a few steps back to move forward and sometimes we skip or run. Our shoes are symbolic and quite honestly... we are pretty attached to certain ones.
As part of our global education at North Buncombe Middle School we decided to look into SoleHope. SoleHope is based out of North Carolina and helps to provide shoes for children in Uganda, Africa. Children there do not have shoes and end up getting painful jiggers in their feet. SoleHope provides patterns for shoes to be cut from blue jeans and then the organization sends them to Uganda where adults have been trained on how to make the shoes using recycled tires in Uganda as the sole and the blue jean parts as the uppers.
http://solehopeparty.org/
Our students were able to then think about being in another person's shoes (or lack of shoes). Students brought in old blue jeans and we hosted a shoe cutting party and international postcard writing/creating party at our March Maker Madness night. Family and community members came out to help. We are committed to creating 100 pairs to send by the end of the school year. Please contact me if you are interested in helping! [email protected]
Also- a HUGE thank you for Ms. Chris Brown, NBMS 8th grade Social Studies Teacher, for making the generous donation to SoleHope to make this happen!
http://solehopeparty.org/
Our students were able to then think about being in another person's shoes (or lack of shoes). Students brought in old blue jeans and we hosted a shoe cutting party and international postcard writing/creating party at our March Maker Madness night. Family and community members came out to help. We are committed to creating 100 pairs to send by the end of the school year. Please contact me if you are interested in helping! [email protected]
Also- a HUGE thank you for Ms. Chris Brown, NBMS 8th grade Social Studies Teacher, for making the generous donation to SoleHope to make this happen!