2 years old

Christmas Charity Shoebox

22:00

I have been looking for a while for a way to teach Ethan about charity and helping others from a young age, and I have finally found a way to start.  It started with an Instagram post of one of these Christmas shoe boxes, this one in particular was from the Rotary Shoebox Scheme, who I then looked up and emailed to ask about how I could get one of these boxes to fill.  If you're not familiar with the shoe box scheme, you basically get a box and fill it with toys (for a specific age and gender of child) or household items and then the charity sorts through them all and sends them to needy children or families overseas.  For us this is a wonderful way to share our good fortune, and to hopefully make someone's Christmas a little bit more bright.  It is a way to start teaching Ethan about people who are less fortunate than we are and how important it is to help people in need as part of his Personal, Social and Emotional Development.


I decided that the easiest way for us to do this is to make a box for a little boy Ethan's age, that way he will be able to relate to the boy better.  I showed Ethan a photo of a little boy from the Rotary website and told him that this little boy lives in Romania (as that's one of the countries that the boxes get sent to) and his family don't have enough money to buy him Christmas gifts, so we're going to send him some toys to open on Christmas morning.  We then went out shopping, and picked out lots of things and put them into our basket for the little boy.  Ethan did ask for things for himself, but I kept reminding him that today we're just buying presents for the little boy.  

In our shoebox (for a 2 year old boy) we have put:
  • colouring books
  • crayons
  • magnetic numbers
  • 2 toy cars
  • play dough set
  • 'Lego' type building blocks
  • rubber ducky bath toy
  • toothbrush and toothpaste
  • 2 pairs of socks
  • winter hat
  • gloves

After we got home we filled the box (we have actually bought too much for the box, it's bursting open!) and then decorated the box with stickers and drew on it with crayons.  I know that it is quite complicated for Ethan to understand, but hopefully this is the beginning of a new Christmas tradition for our family that he will get more out of every year.

You Might Also Like

4 comments

  1. What a brilliant idea!!! I will be doing this with Harvey!!! xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's great :) I'm sure Harvey will love it xx

      Delete
  2. I've just sent an email to get one too! My two-year-old's list to Santa gets longer every day, so this will be a great activity as you said (and a wonderful tradition to continue) to encourage giving x

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's lovely to hear, hope you enjoy filling it together x

      Delete

Like us on Facebook