At Hippings Methodist our Year 5 pupils are our school Rota Kids

Having fun and making a difference.

What is RotaKids?

RotaKids is a fun and exciting way for children aged 7-12 to make friends and get involved with important activities in the community, all while having a great time in the process.

RotaKids clubs are based in schools, youth groups or community centres and with the help and support from teachers, youth leaders and the local Rotary club, children can gain a valuable experience in helping others and learning interesting, new things.

It also brings an exciting and practical approach to supporting the citizenship element of the national curriculum.

By doing so, children enjoy a boost to their confidence and self-esteem at a key age and develop and understanding of how their actions can impact on others.

Both RotaKids and Interact support the #iwill campaign to create genuine opportunities for young people to generate social change.

What do RotaKids clubs do?

The great thing about RotaKids is that children can come up with ideas and see them become a reality.

The groups can do just about anything which springs to mind to help others.

It shows children that by working together, there is so much you can achieve. Examples of RotaKids activities include:

• Filling shoeboxes with toys for underprivileged children around the world as part of the Rotary Shoebox Scheme
• Raising money for charities in your area with a sponsored bike ride, non-uniform day, cake sale or school fun days
• Supporting the environment by setting a nature project in the school playground or local community
• Collecting books for children in countries around the world

How to get involved

There are over 200 RotaKids clubs across Great Britain and Ireland, all making a difference to the lives of children in their communities.

https://www.rotarygbi.org/projects/young-people/rotakids/

What have our Rotakids done to make a difference?

We are the Year 5 Rotakids. We decide, as a class, which areas we want to help and support over the year. We look for an International Charity, A local Charity and an Environmental Charity. We decide how we want to support them. It may be raising money or improving an area. The decision is ours! With a little support from our teachers too and Cath who comes from the Rotary Club to help us.

Some of the Charities we have supported.

We have organised a ‘Mad Hair Day’ and raised money to support The Northern Cleft palette Association. We had lots of fun!

We collected used/old Spectacles to send to Africa for people who had recently had cataract operations in order to help them see better.

We collected old coats and anoraks leading up to Winter so that they could be distributed to the homeless to ensure they weren’t cold when the weather changed .

We worked with the Ribble Rivers Trust and bread trout from the egg stage in a river tank in the classroom. When they were big enough, we let them go in Tinker Brook. This was to improve the fish stock in the river and improve the water.

We attended a day at Brave Church where we went into a special van from Compassion UK that shared the life story of a street child from Rwanda and showed how by sponsoring through Compassion UK we can educate a child and drastically improve their life opportunities. It was very thought provoking and we came back and asked Mrs Westwell if we could sponsor a child. We looked at the children available and chose Alice. We now raise funds every year to sponsor her through her education. We receive regular updates from her and we send letters back to her too.

We decided that our local area had a lot of litter which could affect wildlife and the presentation of where we lived. A lot of us were saddened by this. We worked with Prospects to do a number of litter picks to improve the local environment. Some of us continued this and did a daily litter pick on our way to school every morning. It was surprising how much litter we collected!