Remembering Those We've Lost: Dealing with Grief and Loss
My peer helpers need 72 8" pillar candles, translucent vellum paper, and an assortment of Alphabet/Number stickers to create personalized remembrance candles for our unit on grief and loss. They will use these candles as a culminating project to work with their mentees on remembrance poems that will then be glued on to the candles. We have all the supplies but these.
I run a peer helping program at the most diverse public high school in San Francisco. Peer helping is an elective and an extra-curricular activity that students can do if they are interested in being mentors, tutors, and/or educators to other students at the school. This program brings together students identified as leaders in the school AND students who have great potential but are struggling - some of my star students are not seen as "model students" in the rest of the school, but through this program all students learn self-confidence and extensive leadership skills.
This year, a number of my students have been deeply concerned about the violence facing our local communities. A number of them have had close friends shot and killed in front of them or friends who have tried to kill themselves. Additionally, they have endured the death of family members, pets, and close friends through illnesses or accidents. They notice that the peers with whom they are working also experience this loss. In short, they are surrounded by loss. They see how it affects them and their peers both personally and academically, thus we are teaching about grief and loss and also trying to give youth tools to remember their loved ones.
We will soon begin a project in which students can come make poems or decorate candles or picture frames to commemorate these tremendous losses. We have most of the supplies, but we need your help with the rest of the supplies - paper to decorate the candles, the candles themselves, and stickers to put on the pictures frames and candles. They will use these items to assist those they work with to understand grief and loss better, and explore ways to remember those in our community who are gone from us. We believe that these remembrances will create ways for students to talk about grief and loss and begin to deal with things that normally can be accidentally silenced in school.
This year alone, there have been a number of youth in our school district killed in violence. We hope you will help the students create a project to help people remember. We hope you will help them make this project happen.
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