Quilts from Robert Down Elementary second graders for bodies and souls

Second graders from Robert Down Elementary School in Pacific Grove delivered 10 quilts that they helped make to Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula today to comfort babies who spend time in the nursery.

The project by Denise Johnson’s class was part of a social studies lesson on caring and kindness. Elizabeth Olney, whose son Corbin is in the class, does sewing projects at the school each year and proposed making the quilts. She received a grant and fabric donations from the Monterey Peninsula Quilters Guild, which also regularly makes quilts for local hospitals. The class made 26 quilts and Olney added four more. They are being divided among Community Hospital and the two Salinas hospitals.
Olney cut the fabric and each child selected the two prints they wanted to use and pinned them together wrong-side-out. Olney sewed the edges with a machine, then the children turned them right-side-out and tied a series of square knots in a grid pattern that will hold the front and back together. Each quilt bears a label with the maker’s signature and a message that they were a gift from the class.
“They were so excited about being able to bring these to the hospital,” Olney says.
The project incorporated lessons in math, art, and social studies, Johnson says, and it also taught the children that in the right circumstances, it’s OK to do something kind for a stranger.

Members of the class, their parents, and their teacher delivered the quilts to Catherine Powers, RN, director of the Family Birth Center, and Zosia Chciuk, RN, assistant director of the intensive care nursery. While at the hospital, they fed the fish in the koi pond and visited the Family Birth
Center, posing for a photo with the Dennis the Menace statue at the entry. They also got to peer through a window in the nursery to see a newborn who will be given one of the quilts.
“These quilts symbolize the support our families receive from the community,” says Powers. “Wrapping a baby in one of these quilts is like the community wrapping its arms around the baby.”

-- Brenda Moore, marketing and communications, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula