Girl Scout project helps China Spring students stay focused
McKenna Lowrey swings her legs under her chair and fiddles with the pink spiral bracelet on her wrist. She pushes up her glasses and reaches for two pieces of multi colored fabric. With her thumb and fingers, she moves the beads sewn cheap jerseys inside the fabric.
“A Fidget is something you play with to help you concentrate. I have one of those conditions, and I use this bracelet I found at a birthday party as my own kind of Fidget,” the sixth grader said, stretching her bracelet out and back.
The fabric squares, dubbed Fidgets, serve the same purpose as Lowrey’s bracelet and were part of a summer group project for her Girl Scout Troop 7073 that earned the group a Bronze Award, the highest honor a Girl Scout Junior can achieve.
Thanks to the girls’ project, those Fidgets are filling a need for two to three hyperactive students in every class at China Spring Intermediate School, a campus that serves 675 students, Assistant Principal Kelly Levesque said. The girls will be honored at a ceremony for the award in a few weeks, though a date has not been set yet.
Projects to earn the award start with fourth or fifth graders exploring their communities to find a need. Last year, when troop member and fellow sixth grader Randee Freeze attended a career day, she met a counselor who had smaller versions of the focus tools the girls are using in their project.
Inspired by what she saw, Freeze went home and attempted to make her first few Fidgets, originally called “focus pockets,” she said. She tested them out on a few students in her class, then brought the idea to her troop, she said.
“It helped them, but I hadn’t had it sewn very well. So they kept popping the beads out by accident,” Freeze said.
The Fidgets help students diagnosed with attention defict hyperactivity disorder to stay focused. People with hyperactivity seem to constantly move around by fidgeting, talking and tapping, including in settings like classrooms where it is not always appropriate, according to the National Institute of Mental Health website. The impulse is often considered a key behavior in diagnosing ADHD, the website states.
The girls spent 30 hours or more during Girl Scout meetings and whenever they had spare time making between 200 and 300 of the small squares. Most of the members didn’t know how to sew beforehand, so perfecting the stitching and stuffing took some guidance from parents and trial and error, they said.
Teachers have since distributed them to students whenever they need them, Levesque said.
“Our school has really gone to alternative seating in trying to meet the needs of all our students,” Levesque said. “You’ll find in a lot our classrooms there’s physio balls, yoga balls and wiggle stools, standing desks. And a lot of times under the desks, we’ll have Velcro for the kids to play with something tactile for them.
“So when we see a kid who needs something to keep their hands busy, so their mouths stay quiet, we hand those (Fidgets) out to kids. There’s actually a company that makes Fidgets, and you can pay quite a bit of money for fancy things, when ideally it’s just something for their fingers and their hands to be able to settle. They’ve come up with a genius idea that’s pretty cheap and easy to make.”
Campus employees have spent the past few weeks teaching the importance of showing kindness to http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ others and what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes, and the Fidgets fit right into the lesson, Levesque said.
The troop, made up of about 13 students from China Spring ISD, Rapoport Academy and Bosqueville ISD, even inspired someone in Oklahoma to take the squares and distribute them to those with severe autism and Alzheimer’s disease, Freeze’s mother, Wanda Jean Freeze, said.
“For them to see that, and to see this can extend not just locally, but that it’s gone abroad, is teaching them what their little impact can do to the world, not just to the community,” Wanda Jean Freeze said.
Ultimately, the Fidgets have been the secret to Lowrey’s success in the classroom, she said. And though the girls aren’t making any more because they’ve reached their goal, she’s hoping the small squares continue to make a difference long after the fact, she said.