Honors College

For my honors capstone project, I focused on implementing five eco-friendly sensory kits for a HeadStart preschool in Queens Village, Philadelphia, benefitting over 70 children. The sensory kits were created to increase accessibility to resources beyond those already available in the classrooms. Children who experience poverty hardships are at greater risk to have emotional dysregulation, behavior, and sensory processing problems. By providing sensory kits in the classroom, the engaging materials supported children's emotional regulation, fine motor development, and sensory processing. Overall, my capstone project highlighted the importance of accessibility and how active interventions can make significant impacts in educational settings.

Lizzie has had the opportunity to work with Arts Holding Hands and Hearts (AHHAH) for her Honors Capstone project. Dedicating 16 hours a week, Lizzie wanted to focus on increasing literacy rates for children in Chester County. She has been working to address this problem in several ways.

First, Lizzie attends story times every Friday at the Kennett Square Library, where children read a book with AHHAH staff and complete a craft related to the story. During these sessions, she ensures that parents are registered for the program, as well as for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (DPIL), which provides children ages 0–5 with a free, age-appropriate book each month.

Additionally, Lizzie has participated in various volunteer events to promote AHHAH’s work within the Chester County community. At these events, she also helps families register for DPIL.

The most rewarding aspect of Lizzie’s project has been collecting kindergarten benchmark data from Chester County school districts and comparing it to the number of students in each district enrolled in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Although the data is still being analyzed, there is believed to be a strong correlation between higher benchmark scores and a greater percentage of students enrolled in DPIL.

Lizzie believes that sharing this data with Chester County school districts will highlight the impact of early reading, encourage more families to enroll in DPIL, and foster a love of reading both in and outside the classroom.

I created an online thrift store for West Chester University as my Honors Capstone this semester. This was inspired out of a desire to help fill the fast fashion niche on our campus with a more environmental alternative. I had the support of the Office of Sustainability, working as a Sustainability Peer Educator with a focus on this project. I benefitted from partnerships like this across campus. For example, USH, University-Managed Housing, and the library allowed me to place donation bins in their buildings where I collected over 400 articles of donated clothing in the first month. From there, I placed the clothes online and sold them for free, delivering them weekly to multiple locations to help create accessibility to this resource. Due to the success of this project, the Office of Sustainability was able to make this a permanent position to ensure more accessible and sustainable clothing availability to WCU students.

Sustainability Thrift Store

During the semester, I focused on bringing awareness of early literacy education, primarily for Hispanics. The community struggles to get involved due to the language barrier involved as their English isn’t as proficient as they would like. I used by bilingual skills to bring outreach for the affected community and ensure they have a place to elevate their child’s education. I introduced a virtual bilingual program, dedicated for Spanish speakers to learn English. In addition, the flexibility also provides English speakers to learn Spanish, understanding early literacy levels of either language. I focused on field work such as tabling events in Spanish to expand to another audience. As a result of the efforts, I have seen an increase in Hispanic children attending story time sessions hosted by AHHAH and students are actively participating in the virtual story times. In the long-term, I expect students to remain interested in education and experience proficient reading levels.