Gate City 7th Graders are Making a Splash for H2O for Life
The 7th-grade Humanities room at Gate City Charter School for the Arts was buzzing. It all started back in April. They had just finished reading A Long Walk to Water and Thirst, learning about how kids their age in South Sudan had to walk miles every single day just to get clean water. For a bunch of middle schoolers in Merrimack, New Hampshire, it hit hard. They didn’t just want to take a quiz on the books and move on—they wanted to actually do something.
The brainstorming session was pretty chaotic, but that’s just how they rolled. They decided to go all out with custom t-shirts and handmade art.
By the time the big Arts Festival rolled around on May 20th, the 7th-grade booth was easily the loudest and coolest spot in the room. They had rows of super soft, hand-crocheted water drop fidgets, custom pins, and magnets. They even set up a DIY station where younger kids could paint their own badges.
The t-shirt design was awesome—it combined the Gate City chameleon mascot with the H2O for Life logo. All the profit goes straight to the school’s H2O for Life project to support a well in South Sudan.
Watching everyone crowd around their table to buy their stuff, the kids realized something pretty cool. They were just 7th graders in New Hampshire, but like the little yarn water drops they’d been stitching for weeks, they were proving that enough small drops can actually make a huge splash.
