Letter from Our 4th Graders

QAE CONTRIBUTES TO LOCAL QUEEN ANNE FOOD BANK

The Queen Anne Elementary's fourth grade, staff and parents put together a food drive for the Queen Anne Food Bank. As you know there are about 450 kids in the school and as you may have guessed if every kid brought in a bag of food there would be a lot of food for the food bank and that is what I found out when we picked up the food at the treehouse. The food in the treehouse was such a big pile we had to take a whole trip just to bring the treehouse food to the food bank. Now the brick building’s food was maybe a little bigger than what we just delivered. The load could barely fit in our car and my sister and I had about two feet of room to sit on the drive. As we pulled up the first time there were people getting their food, but when we pulled up for the second time the service was over and there was no one outside getting their food. There were a couple of helpers and one main food guy helping us carry the food from our car to the weighing station area inside the food bank building. After my exhausted arms had carried the last box of food we started weighing the food.

20lb, 30lb, 2lb, 16lb he read the numbers loud and clear while my mom wrote them down with her hands flying across the page, until she stopped. Now it was my brothers turn. Typing the numbers down on the calculator he typed, 

And typed

And typed

And typed...

Until

He handed the calculator to the food bank guy who wrote both numbers down, added them up and got… 1,100 POUNDS!!!​

“This is great” he said. We all agreed. “And the best part is most of the food is canned, healthy, long­lasting foods,” he said. We smiled :) as he beamed down on us. “Where does all the food go?” I asked. “I’m glad you asked,” he said, looking truly happy about my question. “We have two sections and we are one of only 3 out of 16 that has those two sections. One is where we give them a bag of food with a sandwich, maybe some chips, some fruit and maybe a yogurt as well. Our other section is where they can shop for free and get items that they might need. There are labels that say how many of one food item they can take based on how big their family is. Inside the shopping room there are small walk­in refrigerators where they can get items that need to be refrigerated.”

Where do they put their refrigerated items?” I asked. “If they pick refrigerated items we count on them to have refrigerators at their homes.” he replied. “What if they don’t have homes?” I asked him. “Well,” he said In a voice which sounded as though he was asked this question every day. “Let's say you multiplied your class 7 times and they all needed to come here to get food. That is about how many people come here a day, and they all usually are just in a hard time and have a home with a refrigerator.” he answered. Wow–we all thought. We couldn't believe what we just learned and he said, “We now have enough food to give everybody that comes here a full Thanksgiving dinner!!!”.

All fourth graders are currently studying food literacy and we have learned through authors Lois Brandt (Maddi's Fridge) and Katherine Applegate (Crenshaw) that lots of people don't have enough food every day and we wanted to help in some way.

By William Canlis and Andrew Barnes