JHU Circle K completed a mural painting at Joshua’s Place with the help of the daycare center’s children, parents and staff last Tuesday. Circle K is a Hopkins community service group which works with many different organizations in Baltimore. The group has students volunteering in numerous activities from cooking and tutoring to fundraising.
Circle K collaborated with Joshua’s Place to paint a tree on one of the daycare’s walls. To finish off the project, the participating children, parents and staff covered their hands with paint and hand printed ‘leaves’ onto the tree.
Sophomore Sashini Godage, who helped complete the mural painting at Joshua’s Place, said that Circle K strives to provide a large variety of community service events like tutoring.
“What we do at Hopkins is that we hold a lot of different types of community service events, so we’re pretty flexible with our time scheduling and our different opportunities that we provide our members,” Godage said. “What differentiates Circle K is that we try to work with a multitude of organizations.”
Joshua’s Place is a Christian-based early learning, enrichment and daycare center that provides children with educational programs as well as both indoor and outdoor play. It caters to young children from ages two to fifteen and includes children with special needs.
Sophomore Vishaan Nursey, a member of Circle K who regularly volunteers as a tutor at Joshua’s Place, praised the center.
“Joshua’s Place is a fantastic organization. Our club loves volunteering here because of the great students and staff,” Nursey wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “Childhood education is an essential issue that is extremely relevant to our community and Joshua’s Place does a fantastic job of providing high-quality education, mentoring and leadership for the children of our community. Circle K would like to thank Joshua’s Place for opening their doors to us. We hope to continue our strong partnership with this organization.”
Circle K has been volunteering at Joshua’s Place for a year. Club President April Lugo explained that the group works with the daycare’s staff to provide education for the children.
“We tutor the kids and are in the process of setting up an extra tutoring day at JHU for the students that need more help,” Lugo wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “We work with both the kids and the staff there. We lead the tutoring. We tutor mostly in math and reading, but we help them with any subjects they need help with. The topics follow what they are learning in school.”
The idea for the painting came from another one of Circle K’s many community service activities.
“We were visiting Children’s House at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and they have murals on all of their walls,” Lugo wrote. “We started discussing the importance of having a nice place for the kids where they can not only learn and grow, but also become inspired. When we started working with Joshua’s Place, we noticed that their walls were bare and offered to put it there to create a symbol of community for an underserved program.”
After presenting the idea to Joshua’s Place, Circle K hired junior Erica Schwarz to design and paint the tree on one of the daycare’s walls.
“April asked around for people who knew who how to paint a mural and wanted to be involved with community service. I’ve done several murals for volunteer and charity organizations before, and it’s always a lot of fun,” Schwarz wrote in an email to The News-Letter. “I enjoy using my skills for causes I believe in, so when April asked me if I would be able to do it, I jumped at the opportunity.”
While Schwarz designed and drew the stump and branches of the tree, the children, parents and staff at Joshua’s Place completed the mural by adding their handprints for the leaves, which personalized the painting.
“I think the significance of the mural is creating a lasting symbol of the children’s growth at Joshua’s Place. It also gives them a sense of ownership in their place of education, which is really important for children,” Schwarz wrote.
Imani-Angela Rose, director and co-owner of Joshua’s Place, explained that the center aims to help children develop both spiritually and academically.
“It’s an academic setting. In the morning they have Bible lessons, and after that they go into their lessons where they learn numbers, colors, shapes and such. They also do projects that correspond with what they are learning,” Rose said.
The older children at Joshua’s Place follow a STEM curriculum. They have recently been learning about plants and growth. Rose commented that the tree also tied in with the children’s academic curriculum.
“We had just re-painted the wall and we usually just put our posters up there, but the thought of being able to have a mural that personalized it to Joshua’s Place was something we decided to do,” Rose said. “Ironically, a lot of what the three to five year olds’ curriculum was talking about was living things. We were talking about how things grow and plants. So, at the time that the mural painting was started, it kind of was incorporated into our curriculum so that the kids could see how something can grow, how something small can grow up and blossom into something bigger.”
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