LaSalle Springs Middle School special education teachers Cindy Schiller and Lindsey Meinhardt are thankful this year for activity buckets created by eighth-grade student Maddy Wilken.
“We are super-thankful for the baskets,” Schiller said. “We have appreciated the new activities because it has added variety to our routines.”
Wilken, 13, of Eureka started creating “Buddy Buckets” when she was in sixth grade. However, due to obstacles related to the COVID-19 pandemic, she did not finish her project until this year.
The baskets are filled with activities and items to help students in special education classes who have different learning abilities.
“There are fidgets and sensory toys,” Wilken said. “There are coloring books and coloring tools. There are some motor-skill toys.”
Wilken’s father, Aaron Wilken, who is the principal at LaSalle Springs, said he is proud of what his daughter has accomplished.
“Maddie really has a heart for other people,” he said. “She didn’t ask for any help from me; she didn’t ask for any help from her mom. She and Ms. T (LaSalle Springs social studies teacher Bergen Toth) did this thing and ran with it.”
Aaron Wilken said as principal he is happy to see his teachers have another “tool in their toolbox.”
“Maybe this will work to calm (students); maybe this will work to make them feel more comfortable,” he said. “Maybe this will work to keep their hands occupied while they’re trying to do something else.”
Meinhardt said she has been using the baskets to help students meet their academic goals.
“We use a lot of the manipulatives that were in the basket for math goals and other forms of activities,” she said. “The game ‘Guess Who’ has been used for social skills. There is a pie-sorting game that helps us teach colors and fruits.”
Starting the project
Wilken began working on the project during the 2019-2020 school year. She said the idea for the baskets was hatched during Toth’s social studies class.
“Buddy Buckets were a compilation activity from the Project Based Learning assignment project that we did in class,” Toth said.
Toth, a Pacific resident, said she was teaching the students about the United Nations’ 2030 goals, and students had to pick one of those goals, then create a project around it.
“Maddy chose to do a project on education equity,” she said. “She wanted to give (special education students) access to all kinds of manipulatives. It could be books, math manipulatives, anxiety-type things, things just available to them at their level in our school.”
Maddy Wilken said the goal about education jumped out to her because she was already involved in Best Buddies, a program that seeks to create friendships for students who have intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“I liked it when I got to see our people happy, and I just wanted to make sure they knew that there were people who really cared about them and wanted them to enjoy something,” she said.
When COVID-19 shut down schools in March 2020, she stopped working on the baskets, but she did not forget about them.
“We kind of had to put the project on hold,” Maddy Wilken said. “Then in the middle of seventh grade, I reached back out to Ms. Toth and said that I still wanted to do it.”
The pair kept emailing about the project and eventually applied for grant money from the LaSalle Springs Parent-Teachers Organization.
“I made a video for the PTO kind of explaining everything about the buckets,” she said.
Wilken was awarded a $300 grant from the PTO, and another $150 from the Best Buddies program.
“We got to go shopping like Christmas Day on Amazon,” Toth said. “It was so fun. (Maddy) wanted to put two buckets together because we have two classrooms with kids with special needs.”
Toth said about 15 students use the buckets, which were finished earlier this year.
Maddy Wilken said she is interested in becoming a teacher one day because both her parents work in education. Her mom, Melissa Wilken, is a special education math teacher in the Fox C-6 School District.
She said she hopes to remain involved with Best Buddies next year.
“I would like to make sure that I get involved in Best Buddies in high school and hopefully do something special for the high school kids,” she said.