Pencils for Puerto Rico

Hurricane Maria

Early on Wednesday, September 20, 2017 Hurricane Maria — a powerful Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds — made direct landfall on Puerto Rico, hitting the entire island and drenching it with feet of rain. It has been a real struggle for the people of Puerto Rico since then and we decided to help. There are many schools that are not open yet and many more that have no electricity or supplies.

At Lincoln School we are going to collect school supplies for students in Puerto Rico who were devastated by Hurricane Maria. We are going to create collection boxes and place them around the school. The donated supplies will then be brought to Puerto Rico by our friend and custodian Jose. He owns a home there and his family lives in Puerto Rico.

We are very excited to help our friends in Puerto Rico!

We created posters and boxes to put around the school to collect supplies.

We created boxes for Pencils in Puerto Rico. We are going to collect school supplies for kids in Puerto Rico.

These are some boxes that we are working on...

This is a list of supplies we are donating.

These are some more cool boxes. Looking good!

We had so much fun making these boxes for kids in Puerto Rico knowing that we could help kids in need.

Our speech to the whole school on the intercom:

• Hey everyone, it is Ada and Maura and we are from 5th grade GVC. We are starting a school supplies drive called pencils for Puerto Rico. We are asking you to donate new school supplies for kids in Puerto Rico that are still recovering from the hurricane. Last year, a very bad hurricane hit Puerto Rico and they could could use your help. Around the school you will find green and purple boxes, please put your donations in there. Thank you!

Hungry Minds Pasta Dinner

Abraham Lincoln School Oak Park, Illinois (USA)

Each year at Lincoln, the 5th grade classes work together to raise money for food and water charities. We have a dinner called The Hungry Minds Pasta Dinner. The proceeds are all donated to charity. In class we do research on food and water charities around the globe. We find great causes to donate the money. We all learn a valuable lesson, that there are many people in the world that do not have enough food or water to drink.

We created the posters below to advertise the dinner to our school community.

At St. Clare we have tried to build a culture in our school of acceptance and celebration around the diversity in our school. Everyone should be proud of where they come from, their roots and cultural background. Each month, students have created a display to showcase a different culture. Many students, parents and teachers have been invovled in organizing and putting together the showcase. The students involved in the project have tried to include different aspects of their culture such as; food, clothing, language, artifacts, geography, toys, and traditions. The written explanations are in both Enlgish and the language of the countries displayed.

Spanish speaking students make up 5% of our student population. We also have an Educational Assistant (originally from Mexico) who supports these students to learn Enlgish at our school. In the photos below, you will see the Spanish speaking countries represented; Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, and Chile.

To kick off 2018 we decided to recognize our Filipino students. 16.5% of our students speak a dialect from the Philippines. That is 100 out of 600 of our students! We also have many more students who have a Filipino background. There are 7 different dialects of Filipino spoken at our school; Tagalog, Filipino, Cebuano, Bicol, Ilocana, Visaya, Capampagne.

The place that we are born can sometimes impact who we are. The grade 3 students on the GVC Web Design Team decided to survey all of the students from grades 1-6 to find out where they were born. They surveyed 528 students and found out that our student population was born in 31 different countries! See the photo below for the top ranking countries.