25 Days to Make a Difference
Laura continues her great work on her blog 25 Days to Make a Difference. This month she is helping out The Pajama Program and Project Linus. Please stop by her blog and check out how she continues to grow, learn and definitely make this world a better place!
In April 2008 Brian Jones, from New Brunswick is going to ski to the North Pole. While on his journey he wants to teach people about the arctic, the environment and climate change. Everyone can make small changes to make our world a better place. He has links for teachers and students to go to for more information.
Old Sneakers
Time is running out for this but National Geographic for Kids is trying to set a Gunniess World Record for the longest chain of sneakers. Once they (hopefully) set the record the sneakers will be donated to the Nike Nike Reuse-A-Shoe program, which recycles old and unusable shoe material into basketball and tennis courts, soccer fields, and running tracks. The contest ends Jan. 22. See National Geographic for details.
Sites That Do Good
Here’s a few sites that do good things for other organizations and two don’t cost you a penny. The first is freerice.com. My fourth and fifth graders love it and get very competitive in the few minutes I have them go on. They get to play a game, improve their vocabulary and help world hunger all at the same time. The second site; Click to Give supports six different different charity organizations. All you have to do is click to make a donation. You can click once each day. The third site is Ten Thousand Villages. It is a fair trade organization that partners with artisans from around the world who depend on the international market for sustainable employment. At this site you can buy products at a reasonable cost and help people in third world nations. There are all stores located across the US as well.
Thank You Laura!
First of all I want to thank Laura and her mom for the time and effort they put into their wonderful blog. As an elementary teacher, just learning about blogs, this is an exemplary blog that I can show my students and the administration to begin teaching them about blogs. Second of all, I’d like to thank all of the people who generously matched Laura’s funds. I was surprised and honored to be awarded the Better Late than Never award.
I was so pleased to see that Laura wants to continue her project. I love the idea of helping the smaller lesser known charities. I’ll be keeping a close eye on her blog over the year. I will also continue to share her ideas with my students and encourage them to continue to think about how they can make a difference throughout the year.
25 Days to Make a Difference
I just read Laura’s blog 25 Days to Make a Difference. Very inspiring. Let’s see how many ways I’ve tried to make a difference since Thanksgiving time and then if I try harder between now and Christmas will I make it to 25?
1. Bought pre packaged food for food bank at Hannaford’s Grocery Store
2. Bought my Christmas cards through Roswell Park to support cancer patients
3. Sent $100 donation to my daughter’s Food and Nutrition class to help buy supplies for rolls and bread to be donated to the Rescue Mission/Food Bank
4. Sent donation to Roswell Park
5. Feed the birds a variety of food-corn, peanuts, suet and a variety of seeds
Hmmm not as many as I had thought…I’ll have to think about this.
6. Played the rice game tonight and sent the link to both my children and if it’s not blocked by our school filter I’ll add it to my school web page.
7. Bought jeans and socks for a needy child and wrapped it up
8. Bought gloves for the mitten/glove tree at work
New additions from Sun/Mon
9. Went to http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=6&link=ctg_lit_home_from_ars_home_sitenav and clicked on each of the tags.
10. Went to the high school Christmas concert even though my daughter quit the orchestra this year.
11. My husband snow blew the end of the neighbor’s driveway.
12 My daughter donated 1000 grains of rice. I donated 700.
13. My daughter spent most of Sunday baking-bread for dinner and a gift for me to give as well as Christmas cookies that she will give to her physical therapist on her final day this week and I’ll give to coworkers.
Tuesday
14. Today I made a donation to a student whose mother passed away this week from cancer.
15. I chaperoned a concert and I ran off fun Christmas sheets for the students to do while waiting to go on stage.
Wednedsday
16. Tried to give blood but iron count a little too low but my son was able to give.
17. My son made 5 loaves of beer bread. 4 of them will be given as gifts.
18. Wrote notes of appreciation to two people I work with.
Thursday
19. When I wanted to write sub plans for the first day after vacation and teachers and students stopped in and said I need help with….. I just smiled and said let me see if I can help. The plans will get done over vacation and I’ll email them to a coworker.
20. I’m at a new building this year and the secretary has made me feel very welcome and has helped me out many times. I wrote her a thank you note today and gave her a Christmas present that I would have loved to have kept for myself!
I’m finishing this post up Dec. 28 with the last few things I did before Christmas but with getting ready to go out of state for the holidays where I know have limited access to the internet I just didn’t have time to finish this list.
21. The last week before vacation I showed my second trough fifth graders screen shots of Laura’s site and told them about Laura. I added a blog to my own site where the kids could write their own ways of making a difference and gave them a chance to answer Laura’s questions as well.
22. I also showed several of my classes the site Freerice.com and gave them time to win rice.
23. When traffic was backed up at an intersection because a school bus making frequent stops, I let several cars go through the stop sign and cut in front of me.
24. My husband and I planned and made Christmas Eve dinner for his family in Iowa.
25. I helped with the Christmas dinner dishes and clean up as much as my husband’s family would let me.
Well, I think if I try hard and brainstorm with my kids I’ll make it to 25 by Christmas.
Next year I’ll have to give this some thought on how to use it with my students. If the 700+ students each did 25 good deeds that would certainly make an impact on our small rural NY community.
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