Sunday, March 3, 2013

Ronald McDonald House Charities Project comes to an end

I wanted to show you how much we collected for donations for our February Community Service Project.  Our 4th Grade Buddies came down to our room on Friday to help us sort and classify our items (this is a critical skills for math, science and problem-solving).  They were tasked to figure out a system together for sorting the items.  We then went back after we were done the first time sorting the donations and then we did it again, refining our classifications and fixing mistakes (this is critical for reading and writing - editing and checking our work in all subjects).  Mr. Alcamo and I were so impressed with their problem-solving skills, their reasoning and logic skills and their oral language skills as they worked together (over 44 children at the same time!), solved problems, navigated the space, resolved conflicts, constructed arguments and managed their time.  These are definitely going to be our leaders of tomorrow!

Our donations.



Sorry for the blurry pictures but I have to do that to protect the children's identities.  This is a shot of all of the kids working with their 4th Grade Buddies to sort and classify their donations.

Here are all of the donations before they started sorting and classifying them.

This is how the donations looked when the students were done sorting and classifying them.  They decided to put all of the cleaning supplies into one category.

The next category they created was food.

The other Kindergarten classrooms collected gum for their project and donated it all to our project.  There was so much gum it got it's own category!



This was the kitchen cleaner section they created during their "revision" the second time they went through to edit their first attempt at sorting the donations.  The cleaning item table got too full so they broke that category into three separate sections.  One for general cleaning, one for kitchen cleaning and one for laundry.

This was their personal hygiene category.  I was really impressed with how they navigated this project.  This was the academic portion of our project.  We also did lessons on why we collected the items, who we donated them for and that we expect nothing in return.  We will be weighing the items by category and listing how much we collected by pounds and by number of items for math on Monday.