At the start of our making of the Holiday Care Packages we had a lot of help from our school and community members. We advertised at Empower Your Genius Day, hung flyers around the town and school, and also sent the donation lists home with each kid at Lyons-Decatur. We dropped off donation boxes around local business and checked each week and found tons of different items. We then began filling the boxes right before Christmas and delivered December 22nd. The reactions we received from the community members were priceless. Later that day we both got phone calls and letters from the care package receiver explaining how thankful and lucky they were to get a box.

Our other project was doing a Community Easter Egg hunt. We first begun by getting eggs from a local community member, Kay Steinmeyer. We got our money from doing a split the pot and decided to use the money for prizes and candy for the kids. We filled close to 2,000 eggs and hid them at the Lyons Living Center April 9th. The day of the Easter egg hunt we had about 80 kids came and they were all so excited to begin. Certain kids got the special “Prize” egg which meant they got to come up to the table and pick a prize when they were done finding their 15 eggs. Not only did the kids get to hunt eggs, but they also got to take their picture with the Easter Bunny.

Through this experience, we have learned a lot. To start out with we needed a lot of patience to get both of these projects done. It could a lot of work outside of class to get all of this together. We also learned that we need to repeat the rules over more than once for some kids because they don’t listen when we say only grab 15 eggs, but they took 40 instead. We learned the true meaning of giving to others and helping out the community to make it a better place. We are so thankful to be a part of this community and thankful for all that it has done for us throughout our lives.

Thank you: We would like to thank all the school and community members who donated and helped us in split the pot to raise money for our easter egg hunt. A special thanks to the Lyons Living Center for letting us hold the easter egg hunt there, also to Reid Preston for being our easter bunny and Kay Steinmeyer for giving us the eggs. Also, thanks to Melissa Wakeley for helping us hide the eggs.