International Volunteer Day

 The 5th of December is the International Volunteer Day all over the world. In order to celebrate that day, we decided to organize a manual workshop with students from the lower and upper secondary schools of Pułtusk.  The aim of this workshop was to create Christmas packages filled with gifts for the children of the day-care center, Świetlica Słonecznikowa Brać. By doing so, we also wanted to teach our student volunteers new techniques to create hand-made paper bags, decorations, cookie boxes and wishes. 
So last Monday, we gathered with the young volunteers, teachers and directors from Zespół Szkół im. Bolesława Prusa w Pułtusku, Zespół Szkół Zawodowych im. Jana Ruszkowskiego w Pułtusku, Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. P. Skargi, Gimnazjum nr 1 im. Klaudyny Potockiej, Gimnazjum nr 2 z Oddziałami Integracyjnymi im. Jana Pawła II and Gimnazjum nr 3 im. Biskupa Andrzeja Noskowskiego. We were so happy to see students from all those different schools coming together!

On that occasion, we were also joined by Dawid, a Polish volunteer who just came back from a ten month European Voluntary Service in Serbia. After a variety of speeches and presentations on International Volunteer Day, volunteer clubs, volunteering opportunities in Pułtusk, Dawid’s EVS in Serbia, etc., we split our volunteers into four groups of  7 or 8 and started our Christmas workshop.

Sylwia’s group:

Our coordinator, Sylwia, supervised the table in charge of writing the wishes cards that were going to get attached to the presents. Our volunteers put on their best handwriting , admire the results!

Marie’s group:

Marie was in charge of teaching her students how to make cookie boxes out of paper plates before decorating them and filling them with a variety of delicious Christmas biscuits, baked beforehand by students from Zespół Szkół im. Bolesława Prusa w Pułtusku. Her students also perfected their wrapping skills on the cookie boxes and some other gifts. 

Julia’s group:

My group learned how to make green and blue paper bags before filling them with various gifts: box of biscuits, school gadgets (a funny pencil and a mini-notebook), sweets and chocolates, tangerines, Christmas cards and best wishes.

Tuğçe’s group:

Finally, Tuğçe’s students discovered how to create nice Christmas decorations to close our packages. Thus, they learned how to make Saint Nicholas and snowmen out of paper and paper plates. Check it out!

And here is the result of this hour and a half of hard work! 😊

We are extremely proud of the results of this manual Christmas workshop. Our students learned new manual skills (which they can definitely reuse very soon!), discovered more about volunteering opportunities and met new people. As for us, we learned how to organize and run  a workshop, how to solve problems on the spot and how to manage a group efficiently.

  

The day after, our organization was invited for a Christmas singing show by the children of Świetlica Słonecznikowa Brać and we thank them for this lovely evening. The children and the workers of the centre put on an amazing show! And having attended rehearsals several times during my work there, I can tell that they worked really hard for this event. And of course, it was so nice to see the smile on their face when we gave them our Christmas gift packages! 😊

Thank you to everyone who helped with this amazing International Volunteer Day!

 If anyone is interested in the manual activities that we tried out during our workshop, here are the links where we found them:

* Paper bags: http://orsakadabra.blogspot.com/2014/11/diy-paper-bag-for-give-away.html

* Saint Nicholas/ Santa paper plates: http://krokotak.com/2016/11/make-a-santa-paper-plate/

* Cookie box: https://www.evermine.com/blog/holiday-diy-paper-plate-cookie-boxes/

Have fun! 

Do zobaczenia,

Julia