Give the Gift of a Goat

Our school is participating in a reading incentive program this summer! After reading this book, Beatrice's Goat, we learned about an impoverished girl from Uganda and how her life was literally transformed by the gift of a goat. Heifer International is a non-profit world hunger organization that provides animals to families in need to provide them sustenance, and to give them a means of income. In this true story, Beatrice's family receives not only nourishment from the goat, but they are able to eventually build a new home with money they earn selling the goat's milk, and Beatrice is able to finally realize her dream of attending school.

The children and I talked about how fortunate we are to be in a community that is abounding with resources. We have countless gifts on a daily basis. We realized that simply attending school is a gift that not everyone in the world has access to. The children are being encouraged to set a reading goal for the summer, and collect pledges from sponsors to contribute to Heifer International. Not only will the children be strengthening the wonderful reading skills that they have, but they will also be working to *give the gift of a goat* to a family in the world who could use one.

G'Day!

Click here to see our projects!

Over the last several weeks, the children have been immersed in their studies of the Land Down Under! They've been working on a UBD (also known as an Understanding by Design) project.  Their goal was to answer this essential question:  "Why would someone want to visit, or live, in this territory of Australia?" Broken into 7 small groups, the students studied a particular region of Australia.  They read books, viewed movie clips, and surfed through websites to find all of the pertinent information they could find. They practiced creating an ongoing bibliography by recording each of their sources, and they documented their facts collaboratively as a group. Once the research was complete, the children literally cut apart their notes and separated them into categories. After looking at their information, they decided how the categories should be labeled.  (These included landforms, sites to see, jobs, interesting animals, etc.) Finally, using Garage Band, the children verbally recorded their research into podcasts, which we then imported into a Keynote presentation. After adding photos that helped illustrate their research, the wonderful LMC ladies helped us lock these presentations into a movie! The children's projects can be found here!
http://www.sd25.org/~mfijor/Dryden2/Dryden_2.0/2nd_Grade/Pages/Miss_OSullivans_Australia_Projects.html

Special thanks to Mrs. Dufern, Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Kenney, and Mrs. Breaux who helped guide us smoothly through the process, and all of the parent volunteers who helped make this engaging learning experience so successful: Mr. Rolla, Mrs. Santangelo, Mrs. Panarese, and Mrs. Coney!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!