BW alumna helps students grow with heartfelt gift

Education graduate Emily Collins '23 offered each of her first graders a plant with a history that dates back to her own kindergarten days in California.

The tiniest seed can grow into a tapestry of care and kindness.

No one knows this better than Emily Collins '23, who gifted plantlets from her still-thriving kindergarten succulent to her own first-grade students.

Kindness Blooms

Upon graduating from kindergarten in Southern California, Collins and her young classmates each received a single succulent rosette from their teacher.

Though Collins herself had forgotten about the plant while growing up, the small gesture from her teacher grew into something bigger for the family.

"My dad kept the plant, moved it with us from house to house and nurtured it all of these years," Collins shared in a cleveland.com feature story. "It started as just one tiny little succulent and is now a huge piece of the front yard in California."

Chain Reaction

That growth allowed Collins, who earned her degree in early childhood education from BW, to turn the small gesture of kindness from her kindergarten teacher into a special memory for her own students at Falls-Lenox Primary School in Olmsted Falls, Ohio.

After collecting enough trimmings of the small plantlets, known as offsets or pups, from the succulent during her last visit back home to the West Coast, Collins gifted each of her students with their own plant, along with a letter about its heartfelt origins.

The plants were a hit with Collins' students.

"They went home and were talking to their families about how to take care of it, where to place it in their home for the best light and how often to water it," she said. "To be able to go and pass that on and just spread a little positivity and kindness and care with my own students, it's been a really nice chain reaction."