This week, we’re helping provide a small greenhouse and a composting bin for a never-before-funded rural classroom in South Carolina, as well as magnetic Rekenreks and counters for a never-before-funded classroom in Omaha.
We hope that readers who support quality public school education will help by sharing or supporting our featured projects.
The Inoculation Project is an ongoing, volunteer effort to crowdfund science and math projects for red-state public schools in low-income neighborhoods. As always, our conduit is DonorsChoose.org, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that facilitates tax-deductible donations to specific, vetted projects in public schools.
Let’s take advantage of an Earth Day match offer to provide a small greenhouse, a composting bin, and other gardening tools for this never-before-funded school. A custodian, an aide, and a parent have previously donated to this project!
Donations to this project are now being matched, thanks to support from the Johnson Ohana Foundation. The Johnson Ohana Foundation was founded by Kim and Jack Johnson to support environmental, art, and music education. As part of the Johnson Ohana Earth Day Match, qualifying environmental and/or earth day projects, including school garden requests, recycling & composting efforts, and plastic free & waste reduction initiatives will be funded. The Johnson Ohana Foundation believes strongly in fostering environmental stewardship and service learning opportunities in the classroom.
MAIN PROJECT
Resources: Help me give my students a greenhouse and a composting bin so that they can take sustainable steps to become more environmentally responsible.
Economic need: More than half of students from low‑income households
Location: Tamassee-Salem Elementary School, Tamassee, South Carolina
Total: $570.18 (2x match offer)
Still Needed: $420.18 Completed, thank you! Please consider long-term project below.
Teacher’s Comments from Ms. Weiser:
My Students: My students live in a rural area in the upstate of South Carolina. We are surrounded by mountains and trees. TSE students enjoy growing in a small community of supportive families. We also partner with the Tamassee DAR school, which houses foster children. Our students are mostly from lower to middle class families, and I believe providing the opportunity to learn how to compost and grow plants from seed will greatly enrich their lives.
"A garden is a grand teacher: it teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust." ~Gertrude Jekyll
My Project: These supplies will change the way we develop young minds at our school. Gardening and composting will have a lasting impact on our students' lives, careers, and will only strengthen their influence and confidence to be trailblazers in their efforts to self-sustain and make environmentally responsible choices.
Our students will lead this project from start to finish and the best part is they will be able to see the actual fruits of their labor!
We will start seeds in the greenhouse, experiment with different growing methods, transplant some into our pollinator garden and some in our vegetable garden. We will compost everything in our school that we can and use it in our garden. We will collect rainwater to water our plants. Some plants will be sold in our community plant sale and the profits will go right back into this program.
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
Let’s also help this never-before-funded teacher in Omaha teach basic math skills.
LONG-TERM PROJECT
Resources: Help me give my students a language roll and learn pocket cube and a 120-bead magnetic rekenrek line for counting.
Economic need: Nearly all students from low‑income households
Location: King Elementary School, Omaha, Nebraska
Total: $338.46
Still Needed: $318.46 $239.93
Teacher’s Comments from Ms. Tucker:
My Students: My class is from low income families, who live in an inner city community. Most parents work long hours and are unable to take their children outside of the local area.
These children are in need of everyday necessities.
Most of these children do not have what they need to become successful in the classroom.
These children are very sweet and crave attention from adults and other support from around the school. All they want is to find out about the world around us!
My class is inquisitive and want to know everything they can about Math, Science and Social Studies.
My Project: We are learning number sense through bead lines. These items will allow us to visually as well as tactile learn what number sense means.
Number sense is an extremely important skill in every day life.
These items will be used daily, during large group, to develop number sense and help my students grow in their mathematical skills.
The cubes will be used to differentiate learning for the lower students. The bead line will be a visual for all learners.
The other items will be used as support for math stations as a review. The children love to count and these will come in handy to count during our counting collections time.
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
The video belinda ridgewood chose for last week’s Rekenrek project is the best one I’ve seen, so I’m using it again today.
Both of last week’s projects were completed with a huge assist from our donors! And both teachers have already posted second thank you notes describing how their students are using the requested resources in the final weeks of the school year.
The Picture Patch (Austin)
It is with great honor that my kinder class accepts this gift. Our goal is to explore the nature of our school (playground, garden, bee apiary, garden, goats, and other fantastic visitors) and study ways to preserve it.
We are delighted. My now 22 students will make a good use of it.
With gratitude,
Ms. Merino Gomez
My 22 students and me wanted to thank you for all your help. There are great things in our school that we wanted to study. We have gone to the bee apiary and with special costumes, we have been able to make photographs of our bees. Students are interested on what is a queen bee and what are her duties. Also, we have taken pictures of our garden. We want to make photographs of the monarch butterflies, but we still haven’t seen one this week.
We have also made photographs of a roly poly and a squirrel. But our favorite animals are goats. Goats are next to our classroom. When we open the classroom window, we can see them. They want to go in. From our window, we have been able to take pictures very closely of their faces. One of them had her ears cut before she came to school. We all thought that it was so sad. We saw her ears and made a promise to never hurt an animal or plant.
We are very excited that a camera enables us to immortalize objects, plants or animals, and we can study them when we don’t go out, for example when we have indoor recess on rainy days.
All of my students loved taking pictures. They took turns on taking pictures and the teacher showed them how to use basic buttons such as On, off, no flash, and so on.
We all think that technology will help us to learn about nature and we want to study it and learn as much as possible.
We are grateful for your help and we want to learn more and more at the school.
Thank you so much
With gratitude,
Ms. Merino Gomez
Making Math Magical (Waukesha, WI):
Thank you SO much for funding this important project! I was shocked at how quickly it funded, and it totally made my day to see that my project was featured on the Daily Kos website! I love that there are people out there who see the importance of a good education and are willing to support classrooms to help them get the materials they need.
With gratitude,
Ms. Smith
My students and I are so excited to start using these new materials! Even though we only have a few weeks left in the year, we still have a lot of learning left to do! These items will be essential in helping us practice our addition and subtraction strategies, counting and skip counting, and place value skills.
They are especially excited about the new "mini rekenreks", as anything mini is very exciting for first graders. I am excited that we will now have enough for everyone in the class to use one during mini-lessons, as it makes the material more engaging and easier to grasp when kids can all touch and move the beads, rather than look on with a friend.
Thank you so much for supporting my students and helping them to become awesome mathematicians!
With gratitude,
Ms. Smith
Founded in 2009, The Inoculation Project combats the anti-science push in conservative America by funding science and math projects in traditionally red-state classrooms and libraries. Our conduit is DonorsChoose.org, a crowdfunding charity founded in 2000 and highly rated by both Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau.
Every Sunday, we focus on helping to fund science or math projects, preferably in neighborhood public schools where the overwhelming majority of students come from low-income households. We welcome everyone who supports public school education — no money is required!
Finally, here’s our list of successfully funded projects — our series total is 744! The success-list diary also contains links and additional information about DonorsChoose.org.