Welcome to The Inoculation Project! This week, we're helping to fund a Maker Space for a Texas elementary school library, and replacement equipment for a flooded elementary school in Louisiana so kids can learn about sound, light, and electricity. As always, our conduit is DonorsChoose.org, an organization founded in 2000 and highly rated by both Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau. If you’re short on cash, don’t worry — we’re glad to see you anyway! And your tips, recs, shares, and so on are a good free way to help, by helping us get on the rec list and catch more eyes. Join us below for all the fun!
THIS WEEK’S PROJECT
Resources: My students need STEM activities! We need Legos, KNEX, and buildable circuits to create a maker space for students in the library.
School Poverty Level: Highest
Location: Thomas Tolbert Elementary School, Dallas, Texas
Total: $360.00
Still Needed: $75.59 Completed! Please see long-term project!
Expires: December 28, 2016
Teacher’s Comments from Mrs. Watts:
My Students: Our school is a wonderful place to be!
We are an urban, 98% Free and Reduced lunch, 99% minority elementary school.
Many of them are unable to afford the items necessary for school, or any kind of special enrichment beyond the school day. Although they cannot bring some basic necessities with them to school, they do bring with them joy and a desire to learn each and every day! We want to take this joy of learning and expose them to different activities with the hopes of them finding what they want to do when they are adults.
My Project: We are trying to expose our students to different STEM activities while flexing their creativity muscles. We are requesting Legos so that students can be creative and build things they want to build and combine with other building sets. We are requesting KNEX so that students can work with pulleys, connectors, etc to get even more in-depth practice building and creating. Finally, we are requesting circuits so that students can complete circuit activities to better understand how circuits and electricity work. When combined with the activities we already have, we will have a variety of different STEM activities for our students to enjoy.
These activities will expose our students to a new world of possibilities for their future!
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
So that we can help both small and large projects, we usually present a relatively modest project each week, then feature a more ambitious project with a long-term deadline. We can chip away at the long-term project, and our activity can also help push that project up DonorsChoose’s equivalent of our “rec list”, so it is shown to more donors outside Daily Kos. In that way, we can help finish projects that may be beyond our means when only our own dollars are considered. This week, we've got very little left on our last project, so we’re starting a new long-term project as well.
NEW LONG-TERM PROJECT
Resources: My students need these tuning forks, prisms, mirrors and lenses for investigating during unit on energy.
School Poverty Level: High
Location: Denham Springs Elementary 3-5 @ Freshwater Elementary, Denham Springs, Louisiana
Total: $392.94
Still Needed: $392.94 $322.94
Expires: February 26, 2017
Teacher’s Comments from Mrs. Bates:
My Students: Due to recent flooding in our community, we lost all our science materials. Please help us replace the materials lost!
We are a Title I school where 78% of the students are on free lunch.
The school consists of 398 students from various multicultural backgrounds.
My students are sweet, creative, and curious learners. They love to learn new things by using hands-on activities. These materials will help guide my students' learning! Please help make this possible by rebuilding our science materials.
My Project: My students love to learn through a hands-on experience. These materials are necessary for this type of learning to continue.
I have requested these materials so that my students can investigate difficult concepts such as sound, light and electricity.
The tuning forks are used to investigate the terms pitch and volume. The prisms, mirrors and lens are used to investigate concepts such as refraction and reflection. The electricity materials are used to build simple, series and parallel circuits.
Hands on science makes difficult concepts come to life. Because sound, light and electricity are not tangible, using these materials to investigate the concepts bring the topics to life for the students.
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
We helped complete our main project last week (for a series total of 534!)
Mrs. Powell’s Georgia first graders will be able to work with Legos and Tangram puzzles, thanks to last week’s project, STEM in First. She writes,
Thank you so much for your generous donations to my first grade classroom! It is so exciting to have people from across the country work together to provide my students with these math and science resources. My students are going to love the Lego STEM challenges I've planned for them! I can't wait for my students to begin using these resources. It is so uplifting as an educator to have people support the work I'm doing in the classroom. Thank you for your partnership in educating our future scientists and engineers!
Our Dollars at Work
Kindergarten and first grade students in Mrs. Mills’ Missouri classes got a chance to watch duck eggs develop and hatch, and to then care for the ducks as they learned about life cycles. The project was Life Cycles in Action! (More photos at the link.)
...When we first received the materials for this project, we had a discussion about how the incubator acts like a momma duck, keeping our eggs safe and warm. Life cycles can be hard for a young child to understand, but with use of the incubator and our ducks, our students have grown a deeper understanding and appreciation of lives both big and small. When we first used the candler, our students were stunned to be able to truly see our ducks as they began developing in their eggs. Thanks to the candler, our students became connected to the lives growing in the eggs and were thrilled to see how the ducks grew from "beans" to the fluffy, yellow ducklings we have in our classroom now...
...We are eternally grateful for the experience that you provided thanks to your generous donation. The impact we had in our classroom was powerful and something our kiddos will carry with them for the rest of their lives.
Founded in 2009, The Inoculation Project is an effort to combat the anti-science push in conservative America by providing direct funding to science and math projects in traditionally red-state classrooms and libraries. Our conduit is DonorsChoose.org, an organization founded in 2000 and highly rated by both Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau. DonorsChoose allows you to contribute to specific, vetted projects in public schools, resulting in tremendous and immediate impacts from small-dollar donations. Here’s an introductory video about DonorsChoose featuring Michelle Obama and Stephen Colbert. Each Sunday morning, we focus on helping to fund one or two science and math projects in traditionally red-state schools, preferably in highest-poverty districts. We welcome everyone who shares our interest — no money is required! Your tip, rec, republish, comment, or share helps bring us more eyes, and besides, we like the company of others who love kids and education. Feel free to post a link or video, or just tell us how your weather is!
See our list of successfully funded projects. The success-list diary now also contains links and additional information about DonorsChoose, formerly found in this space.