For the eighth year in a row, Hopkinson Elemetary School Kindergarten teacher Tere Fieldson will spend part of her summer break traveling to El Salvador to deliver what might be considered luxuries to small villages in the country.
For the eighth year in a row, Hopkinson Elemetary School Kindergarten teacher Tere Fieldson will spend part of her summer break traveling to El Salvador to deliver what might be considered luxuries to small villages in the country.
Fieldson has collected items such as hats, flip flops, puzzles, art supplies and small toys for children in El Salvador. Her trips are part of a mission trip with Sea Coast Grace Church in Cypress. For the past five years, the school, students and the community around Hopkinson has been helping out her cause.
This year, she decided to take children’s books, written in Spanish, for schools and children in the villages of El Salvador. She asked for book and monetary donations, and the response she received went above and beyond what she had hoped. Many students chipped in their own small amounts of money and parents wrote checks for larger amounts and all told, the dollar figure topped $1,000.
“I am very thankful to be teaching at such a caring, thoughtful and supportive school,” Fieldson said.
Fieldson used the money to purchase books through the school’s scholastic book drive, where some books could be purchased for as little as $1. Thanks to the effort of the Hopkinson Elemetary community, Fieldson will be hauling more than 400 books with her when she treks to El Salvador in early August. The drive started with flyers that were handed out to students with information on the book drive and how they could contribute. The flyers were put together by Leadership Club members of the school. The students used their lunch and recess breaks for a week to paste pictures on the flyers, making more than 600 flyers that were passed out.
On past trips, Fieldson has read books to children on the trips. This year she will be able to read books to children, and then leave the books in the hands of the children to keep.
