Farmdale Elementary is an IB World and Community School. Students at Farmdale learn about the importance of being a citizen of the world and taking action to make our world a better place. As 5th graders, students at Farmdale complete a culminating, student-initiated, problem-based inquiry called the Exhibition. Through the Exhibition, students apply their learning in authentic contexts to take action on an issue or problem they are passionate about. Students research the causes and effects of the issue or problem and then develop their own action plan to address these issues or problems. Through this project, they learn about the process reaching out to community members and local businesses to develop partnerships to support their cause and work they are doing.
For our 5th IB Exhibition project, we decided to focus on racism because it is still a big problem and we noticed that many people are being treated badly by others because of their race. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw that a lot of Asian people were being targeted and blamed for the pandemic and being treated badly. We also saw other racist actions taking place that was hurting or even killing people of color. We decided we needed to take action. Our idea is to promote anti-racist thinking by creating lawn signs for people to put up. Our message is “Don’t just look, act, against racism” because we feel it helps to tell others that if racism needs to be stopped you have to act or else racism or racist behavior wouldn’t stop or be lessened. We hope our lawn signs will be the most effective way to get our message seen by many people and that this will help others spread the idea or mindset of standing up and acting against racism.
A portion of the sale of the signs will go to our school’s PTA. Our school’s PTA supports all of the students at our school and works hard to make sure everyone at Farmdale feels safe and welcome. For example, last year, our PTA organized a No Bullying Pledge Day where they invited all students to take a pledge to “Say no to bullying”.
This year, when we told our PTA about what we were doing with the lawn sign sale and that we wanted the money raised to go to them, they asked us how we wanted the money raised from the lawn sign sales, to be used to promote our message. We are currently working with them on coming up with the best plan to get our message out to the most people and make it meaningful. We know that our school PTA will continue to work on promoting our message even after we leave Farmdale. This is why we chose to have the money raised, go to them.
Any orders placed by Sunday, June 6, 2021 at 8pm PST will be made available for pickup at Farmdale Elementary on Friday, June 11, 2021. Please choose Local Pickup for this option. Any orders placed after that will either need to be shipped via FedEx or can be picked up (at no cost) at Curo Managed Print Production – 2160 Huntington Drive Unit A, Duarte, CA.