Pupils put classroom skills to use to help others
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Fyvie Primary 4/5 bought food for the homeless recently.
They donated six bags of food to the Street Friends Helping The Homeless in Aberdeen.
P5 pupils Emma saw a homeless man with a dog on the street when the class came out of the theatre in Aberdeen and she felt sorry for him and wanted to help by doing something for the homeless.
After Emma saw the homeless person she told Mrs MacNab, the teacher.
They organised for the whole class to get split into five groups, and Mrs MacNab gave each group £5 but one team had more because people in the group also donated money.
The children visited the local Co-op and bought lots of non-perishable food like custard, stock cubes, pasta, tinned tomatoes, tinned fruit, rice and broth mix.
A volunteer from street friends from Aberdeen called Angela came that day to collect the six bags of food from the children, and she was interviewed by Owain, Anna and Emma.
She said: “Food is better than money.”
She explained that giving homeless people food is more helpful than giving them money, and you can also donate clothes and sleeping bags to the Street Friends' group.
All the food gets made into things like trifle, cheesecake, pasta and soup, and homeless people can get meals from the Street Friends four times a week - hot meals are cooked in a church kitchen and they also serve cold sandwiches.
The children learned that there’s more Street Friends groups in Scotland, and they are in Glasgow and Edinburgh as well as in Aberdeen.
For children, Angela gave them a very important piece of advice: “If you see a homeless person make sure you ask an adult before you talk to them.”
We asked Mrs MacNab about what she thought of her class and she said: "I`m very proud of my whole class, especially the way they used their maths knowledge to spend as much of their budget as they could to help other people.”
The groups all had to spend as close to their budget as possible - one group managed to spend exactly £5, another spent £4.99 and one spent £4.95.
The two groups which had 5p and 1p change got together and managed to negotiate buying a very ripe banana for 6p, which Angela said would be made into banoffee pie.
This report was written for Grampian Online by pupils Anna, Owain and Emma.
