However, we realized that it costs money to do all of our wonderful work! We are so fortunate that HTeNC can cover most of our project spending, but with the library and the books we are going to write next trimester, we need a little extra help! Keep reading to learn more about how we have grappled with costs, ways of fundraising, and letter writing for our project.
How much did our MakerPlace fieldwork cost?
We calculated the cost of one of our fieldwork experiences in order to help students get an understanding for the costs of our project work. I told the students that it costs $23.00 per student to go to MakerPlace, and their goal was to figure out how much the trip cost altogether.
The students worked in groups, and broke down scary numbers into nice numbers using number trees to solve the problem. The picture on the right shows our problem solving process.. it was tough! Before tax, it costs $460.00 to go to MakerPlace. After tax, it was $506.00
What is fundraising?
We started the fundraising process with this question. Many students had really good ideas and examples of what it means to fundraise. Here are some of the ideas that the kids shared:
"It means earning money to get something." - Stella H.
"Making money for a reason." - Cole
"I sold bracelets and the money I made went to animals that didn't have homes." - Lea
"I had a treat stand with the treats. The money that I made I gave to people in the hospital"
What are some things we could do to raise money?
We brainstormed different ways that we could fundraise for our project. Wow, the kids are so creative! They came up with so many ideas for how we could raise money. My personal favorite was Casey, who said we could ask tooth fairy for extra money when we lose a tooth :) Some other students came up with the idea of a garage sale. This is a great way of raising money because we wouldn't have to spend any money on the goods we would sell. However, after looking at all of the ideas we came up with, we decided that we are going to fundraise by:
- Making something and selling it.
- Asking people to make donations.
Writing Letters to ask for donations
We have started our fundraising process by asking for donations. We are writing letters to as many people as possible to ask for donations! We spent a lot of time learning about how to write a formal letter, because we want to make sure we are writing high quality letters that will be taken seriously.
First, we identified the 5 important parts of a letter: date, greeting, body, closing, and signature. We had a lot of fun coming up with our signatures :) However, we decided that if we wanted our letters to be taken seriously, we should probably just write our names in very clear handwriting.
Then, we wrote our first drafts. We used a T-chart writing graphic organizer. This helped us organize our thoughts and make sure we included all the important details we needed in the body of our letter. Students peer-edited their first draft using this checklist.
Once the students edited each other's work, it was time to write on our special HTH letterhead. I saw some of the best handwriting I've seen all year with these letters! It was so exciting to see the kids care so much about their work. We ended up spending a lot more time on these letters than I had anticipated, because the kids were so invested in creating high quality work!
Next week, we will continue to write more fundraising letters to more people, and start looking into the next step of our fundraising process.
Here are some pictures about our work