The Nature Seekers have done many community service projects over the years including buying gifts for the angel tree, donating books for a 4 h book sale, donating items to the animal shelter, making ornaments, door knockers, and painting pumpkins for the nursing home. For the last couple of years we have purchased items, packed, and shipped a few Operation Christmas Child boxes. I think Operation Christmas Child is a wonderful service project, especially for children and families.
This year I contacted a local church that has a huge OCC ministry and also serves as a local collection center to see if there was anything the Nature Seekers could do to help. I had 9 children and 2 adults attend this month's meeting. They were excited about our interest in helping and started out by showing a video all about OCC.
They also showed the children their large stock of items to pack into OCC boxes.
They set up an assembly line for the children to pack the boxes. We were packing boxes for boys. Each box got a notebook, coloring book, pencil and sharpener, box of crayons, washcloth and soap, comb, toothbrush and tooth paste, rubber duck and bouncy ball, toy car, gloves, candy, stuffed animal, and a card. The boxes were rubber banded and packed into a larger box. The children worked very quickly and had packed 50 boxes in 12 minutes!
The sweet people had brought a snack for the children so they enjoyed that while they restocked our assembly line.
We came back and packed another 75 boxes.
The children really enjoyed helping pack boxes and can't wait to go back. The workers at the churc were very impressed with the children and asked us to come back next year. My children are eager to get their own boxes packed for OCC. If you would like to find out more about this ministry, visit https://www.samaritanspurse.org/what-we-do/operation-christmas-child/. National Collection Week is November 14th-21st.
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