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New friends: Love pours in from around the world for Ashkar Elementary kindergarten class

By Pat Crossley 5 min read

HUGHESVILLE -- Kindergarten students at Ashkar Elementary are learning that love is a universal language as they receive Valentine wishes from around the United States and from countries around the world.

Created by their teacher Megan Fox, the project is tied to the class' Common Core Language Arts curriculum. As part of the program, students have already studied about Native Americans from different regions of the United States as well as exploring a unit on kings and queens where they read stories based in European countries. They are currently learning about seasons and weather around the country.

Receiving letters, cards and sometimes small gifts from people who live in those sometimes faraway places brings the study to life. And the response has been overwhelming.

Outside Fox's classroom is a map of the United States, visually illustrating that response. There are cards all around the map linked to the states of their origin. There are cards along the hallway from countries around the world. And in the classroom the day's haul of cards -- one for each of the 20 students -- waits to be opened.

First the kiddos have to search the room to find the cards. Once they each have one, they're excited and anxious to open them, but this is school, so there is an educational component first.

"Kindergarten, take a look at your envelope. Put your finger on our address. Can you find the address on your envelope," Fox asks the students.

Then comes finding the return address, revealing the state where the sender lives. The postmark too gives more information about the person who sent the card. Then there are the lucky students who have claimed envelopes without postmarks or ones with more than one stamp.

"Maybe it came from really far away or maybe it's really heavy," Fox challenges them to think about why that might be.

Finally the time has come to open the envelopes revealing what surprise is inside.

There are cards from Florida, Minnesota, Washington state, Michigan, California, Hawaii and Utah, to name just a few. Fox shared that the only states the children haven't gotten cards from so far are Oklahoma, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

One card comes from Maryland.

"Do you remember any of our Native Americans that lived near the coast? They ate clams," Fox interjects that bit of review of what they had learned earlier in the year.

This time they also have received valentines from Germany, Canada and Norway, which has a royal family Fox points out to them, tying it back to their study of kings and queens.

Some are from family members who live far away, like Callie's Nana, who sent her a card from Missouri.

Some cards contain small gifts, such as the one from someone in the military who sent a commemorative coin and stickers. Another includes a book called "The ABCs of Wisconsin."

"It's everything about their state -- that was super cool," Fox said.

"There's actually a card out on the map from Wisconsin -- it was super cute. It says something like, 'It may sound cheesy' -- like Wisconsin -- 'but I hope you have a chocolatey sweet day' -- like Hershey in Pennsylvania," Fox said.

"Just the creativity has been so cool that we're receiving," she said.

The valentines come from friends and families of the students or of other people in the school who have shared it on social media, including Fox.

"There is one woman from Picture Rocks who is traveling right now, so she keeps sending us cards from different places as she travels," Fox said.

"The one card that's out there is from Oregon and it's a student that our librarian used to have that's now in the military. She sent us this really cool Moose Driver patch and told us that she flies a C-17 plane. The connections that have been made are super cool," she said.

And, it's not a one-way situation.

"We are exchanging with a lot of classrooms as well, which has been super cool. They send them to us. My kids made ones that we send right back that have a little bit of information about the Little League World Series and stuff like that," she said.

All together, Fox estimates that the kindergartners have received well over 200 cards.

One student's grandfather, with connections in the Philippines, shared the project and now a classroom there has sent a package with Valentines for the students. In turn, the grandfather, who is traveling there, is taking a package filled with Valentine's messages from the Ashkar students to their new friends in the Philippines.

Even though the project is centered around learning about the world and the people that inhabit the planet with them, Fox hopes that the impact their kindness has on others.

One her favorite quotes is from the late Robert F. Kennedy Sr., who said, "Each time a person acts to improve the lot of others, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope."

"That's really what it's all about...remember that love really makes the world go 'round," Fox said.

So, even though these kindergarten students can't read all of the words, they can feel that ripple of hope and love in the cards people took the time to send to this small school in rural Pennsylvania.

Starting at /week.