Our Clothes - Enough?!

Throughout the year, in advisory, classes and special assemblies, we will be exploring this year’s sustainability theme: ENOUGH!? Through this lens we can ask revealing questions about material and non-material aspects of our lives. When do we have enough? How much is enough? How much is too much?

We recently looked at our personal collection of clothing through the perspective of “Enough?!” Then, students collected their excess clothing to make a donation. This clothing drive took place in the spirit of “Thanks –Giving” for the plenty in our lives, at least around clothing.

The beneficiary of our clothing drive was Community Services for the Blind and Partially Sighted. CSBPS was founded as an independent not-for-profit organization in 1965, the Northwest’s leading vision rehabilitation agency and specializes in helping older people cope with age-related and traumatic vision loss. CSBPS works with individuals, families, and communities to restore, maintain and enhance the independence and well being of people with impaired vision.
It turns that one person’s excess can fill another person’s need.

Story Day with Westside School

Budding authors and illustrators unite! Westside School's Pre-Kindergarten students are teaming up with Explorer West students in an exciting and creative project that brings art and story-telling together. The youngsters in Claudia Ross-Weston's and Nancy Levine's Pre-K classes create the artwork and, later in the week, the story within the picture is reported and written out with the help of an Explorer West student from Aurora de la Cruz's or David Kelly's advisory. (On an interesting side note, several Explorer West students are former Pre-K students from Claudia and Nancy's classes.) Our students listen, help elicit responses from the younger students, and then write exactly what they hear.

Some stories included characters like rainbow-colored aliens, snakes dressed in paper towels, a trio of girls with super-powers, and, of course, super mommies and daddies. We just started this collaboration and will continue to meet once per month. We're very happy to have this opportunity to have "story buddies" and look forward to the imagination and cameraderie that will, no doubt, continue to develop throughout this endeavor.



submitted by Aurora de la Cruz