On Saturday October 25, 2025, AYLUS Roslyn volunteered at the Cerebral Palsy Association of Nassau County’s group homes.
When we first arrived we started out by greeting all of the residents as it has been a while since we have seen them. Everyone was so delighted to see each other! Our first activity of the day was arts and crafts. As you might know Halloween is coming up so we decided to bring pumpkins and Halloween themed arts and crafts. Some residents painted wooden pumpkin cutouts while other residents did window painting. Each art piece was so beautiful. In addition to just coloring, we helped the residents choose Halloween stickers to put onto their artwork. One resident actually put a temporary pumpkin tattoo on her hand!
Our next activity was baking. Since the house that we went to couldn’t have very sweet foods, we decided to switch from baking our usual cakes or cookies to baking pizzas. Each volunteer brought ingredients to help out. We brought premade dough, cheese, sauce, and pepperonis. We first spread each dough out into a pizza shape. Then we helped each resident spread tomato sauce onto the dough. One of the residents couldn’t have sauce or cheese so we made a special pizza of just pepperoni and dough for her. Our next step was to sprinkle on some cheese. Each resident had a lot of fun sprinkling on the cheese! Then we each put on some pepperoni and put it into the oven to bake. While each pizza was baking, we played UNO. Each volunteer paired up with a resident to play together. It was super competitive but everyone had fun! After a few rounds all of the pizza was done so everyone enjoyed some before we did our next activity.
Our next activity was making a big Halloween banner. We brought a big roll of paper and we spread it out on the table. Everyone was drawing different Halloween themed pictures. We also taped on the pumpkins that were colored in before and taped each one on. We drew spiders, bats, pumpkins, and we stuck more stickers. Each resident was so creative and great at drawing! After we finished this we continued onto the last activity of the day. At first we wanted to go outside for a walk but since it was a little chilly we decided to stay in and end the day off with a nice calm game of Bingo. It was a great way to end the day and after that we said our goodbyes. Each resident had so much fun with us and we are so grateful to be able to spend time with them! We hope to come back soon!
Volunteers that participated: Maxim Li (3 hours), Haoyang Sun (3 hours), Leo Zheng (3 hours), Austin Guo (3 hours), Wesley Qu (3 hours), Michael Zhang (3 hours)
Reporter: Michael Zhang
