By NEAL WAGNER / City Editor

Gifted education students at Alabaster’s Creek View Elementary School spent the weeks leading up to Christmas by helping everyone from a grandmother in need to animals at the Shelby Humane Society through their Christmas Giving Tree project.

Through the project, gifted students in Melissa Foster’s class at CVES created a paper Christmas tree by writing their good deeds on handprint cutouts and pasting them on a bulletin board.

By the time the students left school for their Christmas break, the wall was full of dozens of green handprints listing a multitude of good deeds.

“What an awesome learning experience for these young children,” said CVES Principal Brent Byars.

Foster called the project a “huge success,” and said the students were “truly joy makers to friends, family and their community.”

“I am so very proud of them!” Foster wrote in an email to the students’ parents. “Thanks to the kind and thoughtful deeds of your sweet children, our community has been touched with joy this season.

“There were so many different and creative acts of service displayed on the hands,” Foster wrote.

The kids listed everything from helping a woman in a wheelchair get into and out of her car, donating food to the homeless, raking a yard and pushing a grocery buggy for the elderly, helping the staff at Brookwood Medical Center clean the waiting room and raising and donating money to the Shelby Humane Society.

The kids also thanked local firefighters by sending them a note and cookies, donated money to a fund to help kids battling cancer, donated items to the Jimmy Hale Mission and gave a Christmas tree and decorations to a family in need.

“Kindness is contagious and without a doubt, this world needs to have a kindness epidemic,” Foster wrote to the parents. “I love what I do, but most importantly I love who I get to teach.”