Student project ties them together

Poverty has become a more concrete concept for ninth-graders at Sunset Ridge Middle School.

The students recently completed a service learning project to make quilts for people living in the Road Home homeless shelter. The West Jordan students designed, sewed and tied two quilts, which were delivered on June 4.

The project joined geography and geometry. Geography students designed the quilts, and geometry students reproportioned the designs as 11.5 by 11.5-inch quilt blocks.

"We just drew pictures of what we wanted (our square) to look like, flowers or stars or something," said Ashlie Bowen, 15. "(Our teacher) was like 'make something that means something to you."'

To teach the students about the distribution of poverty, geography teacher Linda Richmond, who was in charge of the project, divided her students into groups representing different countries. Cookies were given out based on the percentage of people in a country who live in poverty.

Natasha Pengue, 15, who represented Africa, said all she got was cookie crumbs because of the high poverty rate in Africa. Classmates representing the U.S. received around 9 cookies for two people.

"One of the other geography teachers had kids who were trying to immigrate," said Eva Serr, a geometry teacher who headed the project with Richmond. This facilitated a discussion about immigration.

The activity helped show what a serious problem poverty is and how the United States can help that.

"The U.S. helped us by giving us a cookie each," Pengue said. "We're starting to know what poverty means."

Katie Vance, 15, said the increased unity among her classmates was another benefit of the activity.

"This whole year we didn't really talk to everyone, and now we see people working on this and all helping each other," she said.

Richmond said the project was perfect because with middle school youths it's important to have a real-life application.

"It's service learning so it shows how they can contribute to the world," she said.

Serr found it interesting to see her students' response to the assignment.

"A lot of the kids who rush through things and just want to get it done wanted to do a good job. They had a purpose," she said. "Some of the boys with such sloppy handwriting that I can't read it most of the time really sat down and did a good job, and that was really neat to see."

The project was funded with a $1,000 grant from the State Office of Education and donations from the community. Richmond says next year they hope to expand the project and tie it into English by studying related literature. This will require additional funding to purchase the materials.

Richmond said she is pleased to see the students' appreciation for the project.

"They're old enough, as ninth-graders, ... to see the real-life connection," she said.

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E-mail: twalquist@desnews.com