Creative Hands® Foam Stickers Brighten Party at Brighton Park School
Students at Brighton Park Elementary School are excited about their annual picnic, especially the Creative Hands® foam stickers awaiting them!
The end-of-the-year block party at Brighton Park Elementary School was a hit. Fifth-grade teacher Mandy Guzman credits that success to Fibre-Craft Materials Corp.®’s Creative Hands® foam stickers.
“When I got home from the school picnic, completely exhausted, my face hurt from smiling so much,” Guzman says. “I’ve never seen so many happy kids in one place before!”
Guzman approached Fibre-Craft® about donating product to the event in early June for Brighton Park, which is in a low-income neighborhood in southwest Chicago. The school has a high Hispanic population and many of the parents do not speak English. But Guzman, who regularly takes advantage of Fibre-Craft®’s arts and crafts warehouse sales, has found a way to bridge the language gap with her class.
“If there is a way to incorporate stickers into a lesson, we do it! My students love stickers,” Guzman says. “At the beginning of every school year, I take out all my foam stickers and let my students decorate their writers’ notebooks however they want. It helps make them more excited to write—and writing is a subject that English language learners are not always excited about. Last year, we wrote snow haikus on snowflake cutouts and posted them on the walls of our school.”
This year Brighton Park received five huge boxes from Fibre-Craft® filled with thousands of Creative Hands® brand stickers and arts and crafts kits. The goods were divided into bags so each child through fifth grade had stickers as well as fun activities.
“The kids were so excited about the stickers that they found it very difficult to focus on anything except for the stickers for the rest of the day!” Guzman says. “They just wanted to play with them and count them and organize them by theme and color. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it, but little kids love to put stickers on their noses and foreheads. At the end of the day, when parents came to pick up their child, all of the little kids were covered in stickers. I thought it was hilarious.”
During the annual event, the younger kids played a variety of games organized by Guzman’s fifth-graders, including Bozo buckets, hula hoop contests and fake egg on spoon races. “They invented games with the materials we had; it was amazing,” Guzman says. “The kids all had a lot of fun. Every time the kids played a game, my students would congratulate them on being winners.”
Many students put their stickers on their bodies. Some used their stickers to decorate their desks. Others made cards for their parents, put them on their folders and notebooks or shared with their little brothers and sisters.
The younger students at Brighton Park do a lot of hands-on arts and crafts activities, but supplies are severely limited at the Chicago public school.
“I think that the teachers do an amazing job with what they have, as do the students,” Guzman says. “Our kids are creative. If they want to make a diorama or display, they find a way to do it. The other day, my students made amazing colonial dioramas with painted milk cartons from breakfast!”
Students received five enormous boxes from Fibre-Craft® filled with thousands of Creative Hands® foam stickers!
