Care Corner Photo Journal – Page 25
Sheila Sims Iding
I knew if I ever got to be a teacher I would want to give back and teach kids to give back. It’s an important lesson that trumps math, reading and printing neatly on those lines. So from the first year I had a classroom we had a “poor bank”. It’s a bank where we put coins or money and then at the end of every month we take it to church and put it in the St. Vincent De Paul box…the poor box. It’s strictly optional. No one has to bring any money for the poor bank. Some kids do. Some kids don’t. Some older kids even come back to Care Corner just to put money in the poor bank. Today an 8th grader came in the room just for that reason. (Thank you, Josh.) But it doesn’t matter who puts money in and who doesn’t. At the end of month when we empty the poor bank everyone gets some coins to take over to church. (We are a team.) We try to do it when not many people are there. It’s not for showing. It’s for helping. We quietly enter the church and line up by the two poor boxes in the gathering space. Silently and almost prayerfully, they each put in their coins…or dollar bills…and then they we sit in a prayer circle and talk about the gift of giving. We talk about how we all had breakfast and didn’t come to school hungry. We talk about if we do get hungry our parents feed us. Then we talk about how some kids get hungry and their parents don’t have food for them. How they don’t have breakfast. Then we talked about how the money we gave today will help some kids…somewhere…have food. Then we sing the song “Blest Are We”…we are the children of God. We won’t know who will get food from our money. And they won’t know that some first graders put the money there for them. But God will know. And that is exactly what makes us realize…it’s not about the money.