Our family is learning about hunger during this feast-focused month, and yours can too! We’re setting aside five or ten minutes a day to talk about the problem of food insecurity in a tangible way that will (hopefully) get my kids (ages 4 and 6) talking about how we can help.

At the very least, I hope to be tossing away less mushy cereal and uneaten buttered squash.

Each day, we’ll be counting something very tangible, and placing the resulting number of coins in an empty bowl that now somberly sits it in our dining room.

Today’s count: “Count how many shoes you have in your closet.” Suddenly our empty bowl had a few coins in it.

I’m getting the counting ideas from Jenny Friedman’s book Doing Good Together (activity number 92: Help the Hungry) and I’ll be posting them to facebook and twitter each day. We welcome you to follow along with us. Or sit down with your kids, like one of our other readers, and draw your own list of “countable items.” If you can, let us know how it goes.

Little Miss helped me set an extra place setting in our dining room. She sat in front of the empty bowl for longer than her four-year-old body can usually manage. “I would be very sad if this was my empty bowl,” She told me.

Before school Little Miss First-Grader took the Hunger Quiz with me from the Feeding America website. Her hopeful answers to the true/false question were mostly incorrect. She left the house a little shocked and extremely motivated to collect change for her school’s “Change for the Food Shelf” drive.

Have I mentioned that loose change is in short supply here since we began working with Doing Good Together? So many good causes, so few cash transactions!

So now, as our bodies recover from the high-fructose-corn-syrup trauma of last night and our thoughts turn toward turkey and lovely holiday pies, we’re going to work on filling this empty bowl.

Here are the countables for week one (updated as we go)!

• Day 1: Count the pairs of shoes in your closet.
• Day 2: Count the number of times you eat today (meals and snacks).
• Day 3: Count how many items are on your top refrigerator shelf.
• Day 4: Count how many boxes of cereal (or breakfast bars) you have.
• Day 5: Count how many bottles or cans of soda you have.
• Day 6: Count how many pieces of fruit are in your home.
• Day 7: Count how many pairs of pants you have.

Tags: Big Ideas, Help the Hungry Month, Improving Lives

About Sarah

Sarah Aadland is striving to make family volunteering a meaningful habit for her family of five. Join the conversation as she ponders what they may (or may not have) learned and looks for helpful information about raising compassionate kids.Though she plans to one day put her Masters in Public Policy back to work for social justice, she sees family volunteering as a way to build a stronger community, a better world, and a more connected family. In addition to her children, Sarah tends a large garden, a small flock of chickens, and a habit of mindfulness amid the necessary rituals of parenting.

View all posts by Sarah