There are many pos­si­ble projects that we can under­take with­in our com­mu­ni­ties to help make a dif­fer­ence in the lives of fam­i­lies. This is a great space for your ideas to be shared with oth­ers so please send me your suc­cess­ful project ini­tia­tives with a pic­ture if pos­si­ble to: jlevine@docpc.com. Ide­al­ly, projects should be sim­ple enough for an indi­vid­ual to exe­cute and require lit­tle in the way of cap­i­tal to execute.

The idea I will share with you this month is some­thing I call  A Birth­day in a Bag. As a par­ent and grand­par­ent, I know that a child’s birth­day is a very spe­cial event in their life. For strug­gling fam­i­lies, a par­ent often may not have the resources to pro­vide that extra some­thing on their child’s spe­cial day. That is where the Birth­day in a Bag helps out.

As you may see from the pic­ture I took of one of the bags donat­ed to our local Sal­va­tion Army Food Bank, there are sev­er­al items that were pur­chased from the local Dol­lar Store. The cost to equip a birth­day bag is approx­i­mate­ly $10 for us here in Canada.

I choose a colour­ful Hap­py Birth­day gift bag so if a par­ent has a gift for their child, they can make use of it as wrap­ping. Includ­ed in the bag is a gen­der neu­tral child’s birth­day card, birth­day nap­kins, a bag of bal­loons, can­dles, a cake mix and a can of ready made frost­ing. What you choose to include is up to you. I try to keep it simple.

I was asked if a cake pan is pro­vid­ed to bake the cake in. It is not, with the think­ing that a pan of some kind is usu­al­ly avail­able in most kitchens. So…let’s get cook­ing up some great project ideas that Eye of the Tiger Club mem­bers can try out! I look for­ward to fea­tur­ing your good idea on our Project Pos­si­bil­i­ties blog post.

Sub­mit­ted by Julia Levine

The chal­lenge in doing ser­vice as an inter­net club is that we are scat­tered through­out the Kiwa­nis world. The bonus of being an inter­net club is that we are scat­tered through­out the Kiwa­nis world. We need to look for ideas that we can do whereev­er we may be, to help make a dif­fer­ence for chil­dren near to us. I would sug­gest our own ver­sion of Read Around the World.

I have a con­nec­tion with a local school that I taught at. I go there peri­od­i­cal­ly and read a book to a class which I then donate to them. The cost is small but the ben­e­fits are large.

The Lion Inside writ­ten by Rachel Bright is an amus­ing tale that offered lots of oppor­tu­ni­ty for pre­dict­ing and dis­cus­sion with the stu­dents. It illus­trates that we all have a lion and a mouse inside of us. For Eye of the Tiger vol­un­teers, we may have felt inse­cure as the mouse in the sto­ry but we had to be brave like a lion when approach­ing some­one to become a new mem­ber. Our Eye of the Tiger dona­tion stick­er is proud­ly dis­played in the front of the  book cover.

I will share a dif­fer­ent book with you each month that I have used with suc­cess. I gen­er­al­ly tar­get grades two to four as an eager, recep­tive audi­ence. I know from over 35 years in the class­room that readalouds are always won­der­ful­ly received by stu­dents and by the class­room teacher who appre­ci­ate the gift of a book for their class­room. So…light up a child’s imag­i­na­tion and get read­ing! Sub­mit­ted by Julia Levine