I've made it only 10 days into the school year before there's something that I feel like I need to explain. I normally try to hide my crazy ideas until somewhere near October - just far enough into the school year that the kids need something to spice it up, but not so far in that they think I've totally lost my mind.
Apparently this year, though, I could only last 10 days.
If your 7th grader came home earlier this week talking about homeless cats, fundraisers, raffles, and field trips to the animal shelter....it's all true.
Every last whisker of it.
Errr....whisper. Every whisper of it.
Here's the deal.
It started off as a simple writing task: we were going to reflect on how readers can fight for the underdogs in society, and we were going to put it into practice by writing biographies for homeless cats at the Piatt County Animal Shelter. My contact there (Diana, super nice gal) was going to get us information about the cats so the students could analyze their traits, develop a personality for them, and write some catchy bios to get people to come into the shelter and adopt them.
And then things got a little hairy. (Ha! Get it?! HAIRY!!! They're CATS!!!)
Diana got swamped with things at the shelter (they're all volunteers with full time jobs), and she couldn't get us the information as fast as she thought she could. In the meantime we kept talking about how people can help the underdog, specifically homeless pets. One of the students impressed me by saying that one way people could help the homeless pets would be to sponsor the adoption fee - so even though they themselves can't adopt the pet, they could cover the cost for someone who could give it a home. What a thoughtful guy, right? One of the students impressed me by saying that one way people could help the homeless pets would be to sponsor the adoption fee - so even though they themselves can't adopt the pet, they could cover the cost for someone who could give it a home. What a thoughtful guy, right? And between that comment and the long wait we were enduring... the idea of a fundraiser was born.
So, here we are, day 12 of the 2019-2020 school year. Your students have designed a fundraiser (three separate ones, actually!), established rules and procedures, written professional letters to the principal and superintendent to ask for permission, penned letters to local businesses to ask for donations to the raffle, designed advertisement posters, written radio announcements and commercials... I'm not positive, but I think we might be starting our own non-profit fundraising planning company.
In the middle of this, one student said, "Wait, are we, like, actually doing this?"
Well....yeah. That's the plan!
Why not?
We have to do something while we wait to write the cat biographies...