KAPOLEI — Boxes are piled with colorful slippers handdecorated with beads and bows and bright pink fabrics. A table and windowsill are laden with more of the same as first-graders buzz through the art room at Island Pacific Academy scanning the floor for stray plastic beads and waiting in line for their teacher to weld them into place with an all-purpose glue gun.

This is Santa's workshop at its finest. But the project transcends homey cards for mom and dad.

This year, 280 pint-size elves from Kapolei are creating a dizzying collection of Hawai'i-style "slippahs" so children on the other side of the world in Kirkuk, Iraq, will be able to go to school.

The volunteer project is spearheaded by art teacher Jordan Dodson and her husband, Capt. Clinton Dodson, who is deployed in Iraq with the 25th Infantry Wolfhounds from Schofield Barracks. The goal: to get at least 280 pairs of slippers into the hands of Iraqi families so their children can go to school.

"When you say there are kids somewhere in the world who may not be able to go to school because they don't have shoes, the kids ask 'why' and say 'Well, we have to get them shoes,' " said academy headmaster Dan White. He has watched the project mushroom to include all of the students in kindergarten through fifth grade at the three-year-old independent school.

"Little children have an extraordinary sense of justice," he said.

Dodson's art students immediately grasped the concept of what was needed when she talked about how her husband and the other soldiers out on patrol see so many children without shoes in Iraq. Even the Iraqi soldiers who play soccer with the American soldiers play without shoes, she said.

She followed that up with Internet research only to discover that Iraqi children can't attend school if they don't have shoes.

Dodson bought the slippers through Longs — which gave her a discount — and Wal-Mart, and her art classes will be decorating them through next week.

"I still don't know if he's coming home for Christmas," said Dodson of her husband as she glue-gunned a strand of colorful beads onto a slipper for 6-year-old first-grader Nick Yerxa. "So this is a way we can do something together."

For their part, the children are thrilled with the project, even if the youngest ones don't fully understand the concept of war or Iraq.

"I want to help Iraq because they don't have shoes and if they don't have shoes they can't go to school," said first-grader Noah Kinder, 6.

"They have hardly any stuff and we have a lot of stuff," added first-grader Amai Paulding, also 6, as she lined up to have a rainbow collection of beads attached to her slippers.

"I want to make sure people in Iraq get shoes to walk on," said little Leighnell Bright. "But maybe they have sand to walk on."

As children babbled with excitement and signed their first names on the slippers they had created, the teachers also were integrating the project into that portion of the school curriculum that focuses on global learning.

"It's about how we can help within our community and then branch out," said educational assistant Leah Gionet.

It also helps emphasize another mantra of headmaster White: "Whenever you can, help."

The slippers will be sent to Iraq after the holidays with the help of school Principal Sue Miller's husband, who is in the Navy and whose unit will send them to Iraq.

"I like to show them how you can change the world with heart," Dodson said.

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com.