The Saint Louis High School’s Shark Tooth Woodshop helped with the Small Town Family Christmas event after the St. Louis Christmas parade in the high school cafeteria, Dec. 5.
After the Christmas parade was over, kids were able to color and sand down their very own Christmas ornaments, which they would take home. The woodshop brought out over 250 wooden ornaments made by students at SLHS.
According to woodshop teacher Mr. Maxwell, “It gives our students an opportunity to interact with younger students, and it also helps our students to develop their leadership skills and problem solving. It can be as simple as a marker running out of ink, or what they have to do if they color outside of the lines on their ornaments; fix this, fix that. It’s really just public interaction that’s one of the most significant pieces about this event.”
Besides being an event to give back to the community, the opportunity for woodshop students at SLHS to help out with the ornament creation was an experience in public interaction too.
One of the students from woodshop who helped out this week was junior Tiger Russell. He stated, “I liked participating because I loved to see the kids’ faces when they got to decorate and when they got to see Santa (who also was a guest at the event).”
“Also, there’s a lot of families that don’t have a lot in our community, and I had multiple families ask if they could take extra ornaments with them so that they could use them or color them when they went home,” continued Maxwell.
All around, it’s clear that the woodshop’s Small Town Family Christmas event brought the feeling of joy for not only the students helping out, but also for the families of the community who were able to customize their own ornaments for the holiday season in St. Louis.
