Students in Miss Mah's Grade 2/3 class at Garibaldi Highlands Elementary School (GHE) finished the school year with a cross-curriculum flourish - performing in a play written by the students themselves, with a story line developed at least partly by the youngsters within their given roles in the play.
Last Friday (June 21) at the school, they staged the play "Brockville" in front of parents and fellow students, using the occasion to wrap up a four-month-long effort to raise money to help purchase water filtration devices for disadvantaged villagers in Peru.
At the end of it, they presented a cheque for $550 to Patricia Heintzman for DESEA, which promotes household water treatment and community health care in isolated villages in Peru.
Heintzman's friend Sandra McGirr, a former nurse at Squamish General Hospital, and her husband Sandy Hart have worked on health-care issues in the villages for the past couple of years. It was through Heintzman's association with them that the students in Miss Mah's class became part of the DESEA fundraising effort.
One of the students and her mother learned of DESEA during a Christmas craft fair at which Heintzman was selling items for DESEA, a Spanish acronym for sustainability. Members of Miss Mah's class became interested in helping after the student showed a purse she purchased at the fair to her classmates and told them the story, Heintzman said.
The work McGirr, Hart and DESEA have been doing among the Quechua people, outside the old capital city of Cusco, has yielded impressive results, Heintzman said. The region that once was beset by one of the world's highest rates of prenatal, neonatal and maternal death rates has virtually eliminated the problem in places where the water filters are in use, she said.
It costs around $100 to purchase one of the filters for a home, so the money raised by the students - starting with the sale of student-made crafts in February and ending with a lemonade stand set up during last Friday's dramatic production -will make a difference, Heintzman said.
"Water is just such a huge health issue," Heintzman said.
Back in "Brockville," the students helped weave together a spirited, collaborative and creative production that featured components from many subject areas. For example, a spaceman who was present in the village was an offshoot of an earlier science unit on the solar system, said teacher Natalie Mah.
In many cases, the students were asked to use their imaginations and, staying within their roles, discuss how a given character might respond and help the plot move forward, she said.
"A lot of the discussions were very rich in terms of problem solving," Mah said. "It's fun and creative, and the different styles of learners can feel the role and work out where they'd like to fit in.
"It's a good place for us to end off our school year."
