Schools
St. Michael-Albertville's Students' Bowls May Be Empty, but Their Hearts are Full
Fieldstone Elementary students joined an international, grassroots movement to fight hunger.
Fieldstone Elementary joined an international grassroots movement to fight hunger this year through the Empty Bowls Project, an event the school hosted last week to benefit the Hanover Food Shelf and their mission of alleviating hunger in the local area. The drive culminated with a soup serving Tuesday, March 29.
The premise of Empty Bowls is simple: participants purchase a bowl to fill, giving a suggested donation for that bowl to help fight hunger-in this case, the school chose the local food shelf as the recipient for the evening’s donations. In this instance, the students’ bowls were not actually used to serve the soup because of the limited functionality of some of these lovely bowls, which were created by young, newly-minted potters. However, the bowls served as a symbolic reminder of all the empty bowls in the community and the world over.
In fact, part of the clay used for the very first Empty Bowls event was mixed in with Fieldstone’s clay as a physical tie from this local event to the larger movement. All students could bring home their own bowl, rather than having attendees choose any bowl as is done for other Empty Bowls events.
Find out what's happening in St. Michaelwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“At the elementary level we decided that [since] the child made the bowls, we thought we should send them home,” said Fieldstone principal Jeanette Aanerud.
Empty Bowls initially began in Michigan in 1991, but this was Fieldstone Elementary’s first year jumping into the action. The project began with Fieldstone’s first and fourth grade classes making ceramic bowls under the guidance of their art teacher, Chris Bowman. Bowman and other school staff worked to secure donations for all the supplies needed to put on the Empty Bowls event, including all of the clay and glaze along with the soup served at the event. In total, 544 people attended the event.
Find out what's happening in St. Michaelwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
In addition to the students’ bowls, district staff and other artists also made 60 additional bowls to donate for the event, and a few of these artists attended the event to talk with students about their career.
“I just think it’s really cool how everybody pitched in and came together,” Bowman said. “It really is the community who is supporting it.”