Pennies For Presents

Georgia Park Students Collect a Record Amount of Pennies

For three years in a row, Room 101 at Georgia Park School has been collecting pennies for the CR Mirror Pennies for Presents drive. This is an opportunity for students in grades 2 and 3 to make a difference in the community. Pennies are collected and the money is given to the Knights of Columbus to buy presents for families in need.

A record amount of $620.33 was collected.

Here is our meter bank. It starts out empty every morning, and children come with their pennies first thing in the morning and at lunch time. We spend time every day sorting and counting the money that is collected. We do this for 4 weeks. The money is then taken to the local newspaper office where it is combined with pennies from other groups and given to the Knights of Columbus for buying presents.
This ties in well with our focus on acts of kindness and being bucket fillers. We have been learning about ways that even children can make a difference.
Each day a different student is selected to read a message on the announcements.  The amount that has been collected gets updated each day as well. See the announcement below.

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$620.33

I am amazed at how the school community has come together for this project. Three years ago when I started doing it with my class, we were so excited to take $513 down to the newspaper. Last year, our school population was smaller, so we collected $385.
Because we just changed from a K-6 school this fall, to a K-5 school, we made a goal to reach $300 for the presents. Everything was going along as expected and by the end of the third week we had $267. Then everything exploded. In one day we raised more than $200. Money continued to flow throughout the week, and by Friday we had $592.20. Monday morning more money came in. Our final total was $620.33. I just took the money down to the local newspaper office. It took 5 containers to carry it all. Coins are very heavy.

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I am constantly telling families that it is important for the children to do "real life Math" in order to understand the purpose of learning Math at school. What better way to learn about money than to actually collect it, count it and keep a running record of the accumulating amounts.
They enjoy doing the counting and rolling, and they are very excited about the totals collected each day. They are practicing many different skills in the process and when we study money as a unit later in the year, it will make more sense to them.
Because we used grouping by tens as our main strategy, they have become very good at counting by tens. They are also getting better at counting dollars (2 rolls of 50 pennies), quarters, dimes, and nickels (we received lots of silver too) and adding on.