The first-grade classes at Eugene Field Elementary School in Park Ridge, Ill., spent Thursday writing letters to residents of an assisted living facility a few blocks away.
The students, 6 and 7 years old, are learning to string letters together to make sentences, fill up pages and record their observations, stories and feelings. They’re also learning about empathy.
“Part of the social-emotional component of our lessons deals with showing kindness,” teacher Julie Chalberg told me. “How do we show kindness and flexibility and patience with ourselves and with others?”
When the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close, activities to be canceled, and friends and family members to maintain a responsible, but lonely, physical distance, Chalberg and her colleagues started brainstorming how to weave together writing lessons with empathy lessons and use the results for the greater good.
Chalberg’s 94-year-old grandmother passed away in January. She spent her final years in an assisted-living facility near Chalberg’s Schaumburg home, and Chalberg and her four children visited frequently.
“She would just light up when we got there,” Chalberg said. “It was the highlight of her day, her week.”
Chalberg worries about the residents in facilities whose visitors are now locked out. The isolation. The confusion. The stripping away of a trusted source of joy and connection.
“The last year was difficult for my grandmother to remember things,” she said. “If she were still here, would she have to wonder every day why we weren’t coming to see her?”
Maybe her first graders could fill in a little bit of the space where visitors used to be, Chalberg thought. She pitched the letter-writing idea to her teaching team and school administrators.
“Instantly, they were all like, ‘Yes. We need to do this,'” she said.
She contacted Summit of Uptown, a senior living facility in Park Ridge that provides independent living, assisted living and dementia care. She told the staff to expect a flood of letters to start arriving next week. They said, in effect: Bring it.
On Thursday morning, using e-learning technology, the first graders gathered around for a group reading of “It Came in the Mail,” a picture book by Ben Clanton about a boy named Liam who longs for something to arrive in his mailbox with his name on it.
Then Chalberg and her fellow first-grade teachers instructed their students to write letters to their neighbors a few blocks away.
They asked the kids to make the letters conversational and talk about some of their favorite hobbies. They asked the students to have grown-ups take photos of them mailing the letters. They told the students to invite their siblings to write letters too.
To stave off loneliness, the more the mightier.
The results speak for themselves.
Ethan, a first-grader at Eugene Field Elementary School, reads a letter he wrote to neighbors in nearby assisted living during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We really try to teach these kids (that) the words they say and their actions really have an impact, even though they might just be 6 or 7 years old,” said Chalberg, who’s been teaching for 18 years. “We tell them all the time, ‘It doesn’t matter how little you are — you have a lot of love.’ I just want them to feel like they’re making a difference, even in the lives of people they’re not going to meet.'”
Simple, brilliant guidance for all of us to follow.
