…Water Aid and Dogs’ Trust.
This week, children in our school chose two new charities to support over the next two years. The selection process involved five stages:
- Talk Time homework: children were asked to discuss Which two charities should we support and why?
They were given prompts such as whether we support a local charity like St Gemma’s or a children’s charity like Unicef or even whether we should support charities in school at all.
- Class discussion: as always, following Talk Time homework, there was a class discussion; each class shortlisted two charities for the School Council to consider.
- School Council chose to disregard some charities: Archie in Y2 suggested one or two charities could be removed from the long-list for various reasons (eg there were two Leeds-based medical charities, so the School Council voted to remove one from the long-list).
- Councillors put forward the views of their classmates: Iona in Y5 represented the views of Henry in her class, who had spoken about everyone’s right to water (he’d decided to support Water Aid in his Talk Time homework), and lots of Y3 and Y4 children had supported Dogs’ Trust (one reason for this was that dogs have rights, too).
- School Council vote: after all the stages, Councillors were left with just four charities to consider: Water Aid, Dogs’ Trust, St Gemma’s Hospice and Cancer Research. Each Councillor voted secretly for two of these, and then all the votes were added using tally marks. The results were extremely close.
For the past two years, we’ve supported WWF and NSPCC. Over the next two years, we’ll support our charities in various fund-raising ways, including our Christmas, Easter and Summer productions and an occasional fund-raising event. Because we choose to support these charities, we don’t always raise money for other national events, such as Comic Relief.
