Project Literacy
To honor Black History Month, we sponsored a performance of “Going the Distance” by the Smithsonian Discovery Theater. The performance was held on February 14, 2020, at Georgetown East Elementary School in Annapolis, Md. We received the funds for the performance through a grant award from the Arts Council of Anne Arundel County.
We volunteered at Meade Heights Elementary School helping with their Chessie reading program and the Holiday Shop.
At Georgetown East Elementary School (GEES) AL Chesapeake continued providing help in the classrooms, help for special teachers, help in the Media Center, and at the Holiday Shop. Several members helped in classrooms, one helped the ESOL teacher, working one-on-one with three Hispanic sisters, and yet another led a Pen Pal program with two third grade classes and their pen pals from two classes in rural Virginia.
The Holiday Shop is a “shop” of donated gifts that students “purchase” with good-behavior points. The gifts are for the student to give to family members during the holidays. Our members help obtain items, organize set up and take down, help students choose gifts, and wrap the gifts for the students.
AL Chesapeake provided a hard-back book, “Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life”, a fiction novel by James Patterson, to each graduating fifth grader at Meade Heights Elementary School and Van Bokkelen Elementary School this year. Due to the pandemic, we were not able to present the books to the students in person. So, working with the school system, books were mailed to each student for us, along with a note from us. Due to covid-19, we had to get creative and ended up giving books to Georgetown East Elementary School administrators to hand out to families who came to the school for free food during the pandemic. Normally, the books would have been given by us to each student individually. We were happy to find this solution because we wanted students to still be able to have a book to read even though they weren’t physically in the classroom.
Twenty-seven members participated in Project Literacy.