Centennial Hylands ES sends birthday wishes to families in Northern Canada
March 28, 2019
SHELBURNE, Ontario – Students at Centennial Hylands Elementary School are showing children thousands of kilometres away that they care, by sending boxes of birthday treats to children in Northern Canada.
The school is participating in the Northern Birthday Box Project. The volunteer-run project connects sponsors with families in Northern regions where the cost for food and supplies can be extremely high.
Sponsors receive information about a child in a Northern community, such as their favourite colours, date of their birthday and age. Groups then put together birthday boxes, filled with items to make the child’s day a little bit more special, which are then shipped north. One of the boxes sent by CHES travelled more than 2,800 km to reach its destination.
The project is an eye-opener, when you see that the price of items you may routinely purchase without a second thought are cost-prohibitive in other parts of the country.
CHES classes looked at the cost of some typical birthday celebration supplies in Northern Canada, such as icing at $10.99 and cake mix at $9.99. They also compared costs in the North to items in their community, finding that a box of spaghetti costs families in the North $17 more than it does here, a bag of grapes is around $20.50 more than what we would expect to pay.
Not only did the project tie into the CHES students’ math and geography lessons, it also taught them about empathy.
“We talked about putting yourself in someone else shoes and imagining how you might feel if you knew the cost of your birthday party was unreasonable and it would be difficult or impossible for you family to get party supplies. Students also brought up how they might feel if the toy they wanted wasn’t available in their community,” said staff at the school.
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