School rallies behind tsunami relief effort

By Melanie Helt

The Blaine middle school Tsunami Change Drive was a huge success! In just five days our school of just 550 students raised over $2,500! Each day, my students collected each classroom’s container and sorted and counted all the change inside. As the containers were brought in each morning, our eyes kept getting bigger as the piles increased by almost double each day. On the last day alone over $1,100 was collected in change!

Interestingly there was a strong connection between this terrible tragedy and our sixth grade science curriculum. We just happened to be studying about waves and the last section of the chapter was devoted to seismic waves including a piece on tsunamis.

The essay question on their test last Friday was to describe how a tsunami is formed using vocabulary from the chapter. Because this topic had become so real to these kids, they wrote some amazing paragraphs explaining tsunamis.

Although I would never have wanted something this tragic to occur, it was wonderful to see how much learning, both emotional and academic took place because of it.

Here are some thoughts from students in my class that participated in this project:

“I think it was a beautiful thing that the school did to raise money for such a bad thing that happened out of nature’s will.”
Korynn Hudson

“I thought it was really great to help the Tsunami survivors but collecting all that change was really hard to count.”
Amy Leeking

“We had a lot of fun working on this project because we knew we were doing something good for somebody else that needs it a lot more then us.”
Matt Doll

“I think everyone cared a lot about the people in Asia or they wouldn’t have helped out so much.”
Jenifer Jackson

“I enjoyed doing stuff for other people other then ourselves.”
Kevin Feathers

“When you were counting all the money you could feel all the power of helping another nation.”
Kyle Petty

“I think it was really wonderful what we did because all the people that died and all the people that are still alive needed a lot of help and it was nice of us to collect all that money for them.
Kayla Hudson

“I had fun collecting all the money for the people who lost their lives and who are still in the hospital. I hope that everybody gets found and gets better.”
Rain Denell