Can-a-thon

If you’re following our 5th grade blog, you may have noticed Sofia’s post about our school’s participation in a Can-a-thon to collect canned food for the Athens Area Emergency Food Bank, which helps feed families in our community:

Can-a-thon posters were hung up all around the school as a reminder for students and teachers to bring in cans!

For the past month, students have been bringing in canned food and other non-perishable edibles to their homeroom teachers, and students in Mrs. Adams’ and Mrs. Sitler’s Spectrum classes have been collecting the cans and tracking each homeroom’s progress in two places.

First, students in Mrs. Sitler’s Spectrum class have been charting each class’s collection results on this massive graph that’s hanging in our cafeteria:

Thanks also to Mrs. Adams for designing this colorful, reusable graph and for doing a LOT of the assembly.
I just love how she used images of canned food to fill the letters of the word “Can-a-thon” and the teachers’ names!

Second, Mrs. Adams has been using the bi-weekly class collection numbers to update a Google Spreadsheet of all the classes’ progress, so we will have a digital copy of the results after the big graph comes down.

In the end, the classes who collected the most cans earned the opportunity to take a walking field trip to the Athens Area Emergency Food Bank, where director Kim Ramos will take classes on a tour of the food bank and teach them how the food bank’s workers distribute food to needy families in our community.

Teachers are not required to participate in this incentive, and sometimes scheduling a field trip in the midst of year-end chaos is a challenge! But the students who do participate really get a lot out of it, and I love that our school is close enough to the food bank for us to do this. What an amazing way for students to get a first-hand glimpse of how their kindness and generosity can help brighten a family’s holiday season!

This year, our school collected 2,048 cans for the Can-a-thon (wow!), and I am pleased to announce our top collecting classes:

1. Mrs. Fielding’s kindergarten class
2. Ms. Carrithers’ 4th grade class
3. Mrs. Hart’s 2nd grade class
4. Mrs. Kraus’s 4th grade class
5. Mrs. Corbett’s 1st grade class

A huge thanks goes out to all of the teachers, students, and parents who helped us make this year’s Can-a-thon such a big success. I know the Athens Area Emergency Food Bank–and the families they help–are so grateful for your generosity and support!