Giancarlo Lara, left, and Lauren Weber, right, present the gifts to Richard Arnold, director of development and communications at Covenant House.

LAPLACE — The fifth grade class at St. Joan of Arc Catholic School recently completed a service-learning project funded by the Brown Foundation.

The students each wrote a children’s book and illustrated it, then sent it off to be printed and bound. They made puppets to match the characters in the books and also designed bookmarks for the children.

Those items were included in a cloth bag decorated by the students, along with another book and toiletry items, which were donated in hand-decorated paper bags.

To encourage literacy from a young age, one bag of each will be given to a homeless mother and her child living at the Covenant House in New Orleans. Upon completion of the project, representatives from the class delivered the bags.