School

School has been going well the last few weeks. The computers are up and running, our PowerPoint presentations are finally done (as of today), and Christmas Break is coming up fast.

One of the joys I have at school is that I am directly involved with the student council at our school. With the holiday season, we have been working on a couple of service projects. In November, we sponsored a can food drive at the school and had a mountain of items donated by the students and their families. The project we are currently working on is called "Warm the Soles." This charity is done by the local credit union to raise money to buy shoes for needy kids in the area. We choose to work through this charity as it directly helps students at our schools and surrounding neighborhoods. This is the second year we've done Warm the Soles and it ends up warming your heart as well. Each classroom is given a jar to collect spare change and monetary donations, at the end of the week, the student council will gather all of the coins, wrap and count them. Last year, we raised over $500. We have given the school the goal to beat last year's amount. This morning, we decided to give a little more and told the school that there would be a collection jar at our student store and whatever was donated this morning, the student council would match. You wouldn't think that an elementary school would donate so much money, but within a 15 minute period, $51.04 was put in our jar (we had to get a bigger jar at one point) so after our matching money, we had $102.08 added to our bucket of coins. I am so impressed at the giving hearts the students at our school have. Each year I am at a school that works with such a cause, I challenge my own class to be able to raise enough money as a class to buy at least one pair of shoes (around $20) which is about 75 cents per student (we're working on ratios this week), I think it helps put things in perspective in that every little bit helps and that everyone can make a difference. I have had students put in a few dollars and others a few cents, but the one that has been the biggest donation is the morning I mentioned that we still need to put money in our can and the only student that jumped up to do so in my class was one of the students from our school who was identified as a student who could use one of the pairs of shoes from Warm the Soles. We've been dumping the class cans every once in awhile into a 5-gallon bucket, yesterday we had 2 1/2 to 3 inches in the bucket. We're going to hold a "guess how much" for the school on Monday or Tuesday and then count it all up after school on Tuesday, it should be fun.