Welcome to The Inoculation Project (after that brief senior-moment hiatus)! This week, we're helping to fund a Michigan school’s bird-and-butterfly garden, created and maintained by the 4th-6th grade Green Team. 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. It seems we will have even more work to do going forward, so, let’s get started. Join us below for all the fun!
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.
I’m happy to say that not only our most recent formally-presented projects, but also the one found last week for us by Eastern Bluebird, have been completed — you can see more about them further below. So this week, we’re starting a new long-term project as our main project!
NEW LONG-TERM PROJECT
Resources: My students need a bird bath, bird seed, and watering cans for our bird and butterfly garden.
School Poverty Level: Highest
Location: Tyrone Elementary School, Harper Woods, Michigan
Total: $249.31
Still Needed: $249.31 $63.31
Expires: March 10, 2017
Teacher’s Comments from Mrs. Smith:
My Students: We start each Green Team Meeting discussing ways to help make ours a more eco-friendly school.
My Green Team is a group of dedicated 4th - 6th grade students that stay after school to reduce our school's carbon footprint.
They all qualify for free breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. Life is not always easy for my students, but they come to school with a smile on their faces each day and a thirst for learning. They leave each day feeling proud of what they've accomplished.
My Project: My Green Team has been creating a bird and butterfly garden in front of our school for the past three years. We have planted some beautiful flowers to attract birds, butterflies and bees. We also made bird feeders out of recycled materials to hang in the area. This project would add a much needed bird bath to our garden to attract birds and also beautify the area. The bird seed would be a tremendous help because we always need seed to refill our feeders. The watering cans would make it so much easier for my students to go out and water our more delicate flowers. This project will help us to maintain Michigan Green School Status again for the 2016-2017 school year.
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
We helped complete our main project and long-term project from two weeks ago (for a series total of 536!)
Mrs. Watts’s Dallas elementary school students will be building and exploring with Legos, K’NEX, and buildable circuits, thanks to the project Maker Space Friday. She writes:
I recently got together with my students who are part of my maker space Friday club. They were excited about the maker space items I already had. When they see what we're getting, they are going to flip! Thank you so much!
We were also able to help Mrs. Bates’s Louisiana elementary students with tuning forks, prisms, mirrors and lenses, to replace materials lost to flooding, in the project Let's Investigate! Hands-On Science. She writes:
Thank you so much for your contributions! Your generosity is greatly appreciated. I can not wait to use these materials. Since the flood, we have had our nose in books. It will be such a treat for my students to put their hands on science and see their excited faces as they learn!
Last week, our friend Eastern Bluebird found a good project that our TIP family gave a hand to as well. In AP "Lacks" Books, students from Mrs. Chadwell’s South Carolina high school class wrote their own proposal asking for copies of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the woman whose cancer cells, cultured at Johns Hopkins in 1951 without her knowledge, are the source of an “immortal” cell line still used in research today. Mrs. Chadwell writes:
Upon opening my email today, I found a delightful message - my project was funded. Thank you so much for giving the gift of reading to my students.
Our Dollars at Work
First grade students in Mrs. C’s Florida classes got a house building center, shapes kit, books and other materials to help them understand geometry. The project was Hands On Geometry! (More photos at the link.)
...I am so excited to have these resources that will give me the opportunity to show my students these math concepts in such a tangible and hands-on way. Included in the donation that you made to my classroom are some wonderful books that introduce the subject in an interesting way. First graders love listening to stories and they think it is an extra special treat to have that during math block. They have even been reading the books during dismissal time! All of the resources came with critical thinking cards that not only ask the students to manipulate and create but also solve problems. This is such as necessary skill that extends far beyond a test!
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.