I recently had a student teacher, Nancy Moreiro who wanted to teach the students something important and to get involved with the school life by doing a fund-raiser for a worthy cause. After doing research she decided upon Spread the Net. Her way of raising money was by doing a "penny war". She organized it by class and ran it for 4 days. Each day the students brought in pennies for their own class (positive points) and lots of other money for negative points that went into the buckets of other classes. Because it was based on points (pennies being the only positive currency) and the negative points was everything else (a nickel is -5, a dime -10 etc.). Well the mood caught on and students were lugging their money in each day. By day 2 the school had raised around $250, which thrilled us because we are a school of only 120. By the 4th day we weren't sure what would happen...would all the pennies already be in? We were totally caught off guard. A couple of students in one of the grades brought in so many pennies that we spent most of the day counting. As it turned out that one class brought in over 15 000 pennies (mostly thanks to a couple of students). One of the boys had been saving pennies all his life and was adding it to the big bucket of his father's.
The mood in the school was very positive as the competition continued. Strategies were developed to win the pizza lunch. When it was all said and done, the school raised close to $900.00 in 4 days...not bad!!!
Respectfully submitted by Heather Webster
