As part of our “How We Organize Ourselves” planner, students planned a system to collect food for local food.  We sorted all the food and were able to donate a total of 139 canned food items and 50 box/dry food items to the Boscawen church pantry.  Wow!!! that is 189 items total!!.  They were creating over 140 Thanksgiving Day food boxes for local families and were very appreciative of our efforts.  Some of the food will go directly to the pantry which is located next to the church and is open week days 11-12 and 3-6. They also have a clothes closet upstairs in the church and medical supplies that they lend out for people in need.  They are always accepting donations if you find yourself cleaning out and don’t know what to do with some things.

Thank you to all of the families and individuals that helped us make this donation!  We appreciate you!

Today we had another special visitor who was from the United States Armed Forces. One of our student’s dad is a chief in the Army.  He came to share about what his job is with the students.  There were some really good questions about weather, travel, and duties. Some of the things that we learned are: he has been in the army for 27 years, army people can travel all over the world, weapons are stored in a safe,  a battle can be 11 minutes or several days, Veteran’s Day is to honor people who are serving and who have served in the service, the are different levels of training, army people have to do push-ups when they train, people take risks when they are in the army, you need special gear when you are in a sandstorm (helmet, goggles), a veteran is someone who has served in the military for at least Marines.

We appreciate all that he does for our country and all of the other men and women who also serve our country. We made postcards and wrote letters of appreciation to veterans to show appreciation and thank them for serving our country.

The class voted and decided on creating a system to collect food and help out people who are homeless or having a difficult time financially.  Today they decided to collect food for Thanksgiving baskets/boxes for local families.  We have a list of jobs and people needed to make our system work well.  Next, we will be working on getting the word out.

Look for information coming home about the food drive.

Theme: How We Organize Ourselves

Central Idea: People create systems to meet their needs and wants.

We have been investigating government and economic systems over the past several weeks. During the past week, students have been working in groups of 3 to design a plan for a system that will meet the needs and/or wants of our community.  I am quite impressed with the ideas that students have generated: cleaning up trash, having a bake sale to raise money to buy new books for our classroom, cooking a hot dinner for homeless people, and several others.  Teams will be creating presentations to share their ideas and then the class will discuss the various systems and vote on one system that we will work through as a class.  I can’t wait to hear about them all!