It is already the last week of Genius Hour!!! It has been very exciting but also there are a lot of loose ends to tie up this week as we come to an end. Over the course of these 12 weeks we focused on a goal of helping the community and bringing joy to those in our community, as our project was a good way to accomplish this goal with it officially being over we can confidently say that we accomplished this goal. We are very thankful to have been able to complete this project and help those in our community.
With all of that being said, this last week of genius hour we primarily focused on our project. With making our project we are trying to compile photos and all of the key parts of the project that were an important part of the process. We also worked on the format we were going to do our presentation in and just continued to edit and work on our slides some more while working through how much content we will put on each slide to keep our audience interested and paying attention during our presentation. Some things that we are making sure to include is our initial way that we figured out what we were going to do for the project since it was such a process to come to our idea of a food drive. Another thing that we want to focus on is the process that it took to complete our project and the time and planning that we had to put into it. Along with this we think that it will be important to share the ways that we advertised our food drive throughout the weeks that it was running because that was something that we did consistently throughout the process. Another important aspect that we are focusing on is the people that we worked with and how helpful they were, from the hunger fighters group and especially Mr. Welch to all of the teachers and students who donated or helped us in any way, without these people we would have not been able to complete our project successfully.
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It is so crazy to see how close we are to finishing our Genius Hour Projects. All of us have worked little by little and over a span of weeks and it is cool to see how all of us have grown, changed, and made progress throughout each of our projects.
So far throughout weeks ten and eleven we have worked on our presentation. Each of us brainstormed together on how exactly we could present, write, and explain everything we have done over the past eleven weeks. We decided to begin on simplistics on the first few slides. We used a pre-made presentation that was from slides and we used it so that it is meant to be aesthetic, minimalistic, and be able to fit into the theme of a food drive. We began by describing everything, even a few mistakes, to get us to the main idea of our project. We wanted to help people, we wanted to be able to enjoy the project, not just see this project as a school assignment but also intertwine it within our lives, so we tried describing that in a lower sense to hopefully allow us to make connections with the audience. We added animations to each slide, then added animations to text pieces and images. We decided to add lots of animations to be able to give each of us enough time to talk throughout our presentation without us getting distracted, or other students getting distracted. We also wanted to make a visual appeal to collect the attention of the class on us, our slides, and our explanations of our slides and what we did . Overall we have gone back and checked our work making sure we have done what we could. We are going to try our best to collect attention on the slides without using too much information on the slides themself, but adding just enough information to be able to guide each of us throughout the presentation. We are trying to brainstorm ways we could get the class involved in our project and our presentation of the project, but we haven't gotten very far with that. I do believe we are going to make a thank you slide thanking the people we know who donated and thank the people we didn't see donate. We want to show appreciation to the people who were caring enough to give back to the community and help the ones who helped us! For week nine we were pretty productive and managed to get a lot done. We started off by talking with Mr. Welch. We asked him about going around the community and giving out the donation boxes, but we found out that it can be a little more complicated. This is because it can be seen as unfair to the other students because we are students. So instead of going out to give out Thanksgiving donations we are going to talk out some more things and have hopes to be able to go to houses and give out donations for Christmas.
During Flex Time on Monday and Tuesday we worked on a few things to contribute to our project. First we transferred what donations we had collected and brought to Mr. Barker's room and brought them down into Mr. Welch’s room. Once we had done that we went to pack boxes to bring to teachers for them to donate. We made 9 boxes total! The boxes were full of two corn cans, two green bean cans, two tuna cans, one box of rice, two mandarin orange cans, one apple sauce jar, one box of cake mix or brownie mix, two cartons of milk, and lastly one box of cereal. We finished these boxes throughout Monday and Tuesday Flex Time. Once this was done we delivered 5 boxes to Mr. Long, then 4 to the office so they could deliver them during our genius hour working time on Tuesday. Considering only having two days to complete the final pieces for our project we worked nicely, efficiently, and smoothly. We are very thankful to the people who donated and were willing to help! We talked to him about helping out more and maybe gaining some leadership within Hunger Fighters. We are both happy about what the future may hold for volunteering and helping Davie County Hunger Fighters. This week has been getting pretty busy as the food drive came to a close and we began to collect goods and create a plan as to how we are going to conclude this drive as Thanksgiving is next week! Over this week we spent some time collecting our donations from around the school and around the community. We also worked on our blogs and figured out the last minute logistics of how the ending drive will go. As we spent most of our class time on Wednesday collecting donations we were pretty happy with the turn out from the donations around the school as everything donated will be added to the Hunger Fighters donations that they already have and are distributing around the community. With that being said this week and the beginning of next week should be pretty busy, we still have some donations from people who do not go to the school to bring in on Monday. We also are planning on spending our flex time on Monday bringing the donations down from Mr. Barker’s room down to the food donation room. The plan is to bring the donations down on Monday and then those donations will be packed and then later assigned to a home. Over the past week we have also had some simple things that we have had to do to finish out the food drive like taking down flyers we had around the school and also just collecting “last minute” donations from around the school. But overall this week we are going to bring all of our donations into the school and food room at the school. We are so thankful for all the donations we have received and for the fact that we are able to help people around the community this holiday season.
We decided to combine week 6 and week 7 because these past few weeks we have not had much to do because the drive is going on through Monday so we just worked on advertisement and just some simple logistics. We have continued to work on advertisements by posting on the boards around the school and continuing to have information about the drive in the morning announcements. We have gotten both friends and family to advertise the drive throughout their social media, mostly facebook. This time we are asking for donations from other people, such as family members, and trying to get other people to post about our need for food donations. Another thing we are going to try to focus on are money donations as we are wanting to be able to supply some families with a turkey for their Thanksgiving meals. We are also communicating with other teachers, such as Mr. Ferebee and Mr. Welch about any other mistakes and complications of other food drives interacting with each other. After speaking with Ferebee we decided that it would be best if we did our own separate food drive from the student council and the student council will be starting theirs in the winter. We have had communication slowing down between us and Mr. Welch as we have figured out mostly what we are doing as we wait for a few more donations to roll in before the drive ends on Monday. After the drive we are planning on doing some collections next week and maybe passing them out if we are able to do that. We have also come across a few more problems recently like lack of communication or just trying to get more donations from people but we are still working our way through them as we continue to find some more donations. We are trying to find more people to donate outside of school such as grandparents, parents, friends, and other family members. We have gotten other friends to pass out our flyers to other people and teams. We have tried to get papers out to other teachers, sporting teams, and even the drama club! All donations are greatly appreciated, so thank you to all who have/are going to donate!
For week 5, we have continued making progress and mainly working on advertisements and spreading the word for this week. Our main focus this week was just getting donations and advertising to get donations, we spent some time brainstorming effective ways to catch someone’s eyes with poster designs or just verbal advertisements. We started off by contacting Mrs. Koontz to get some information in the announcements that teachers announce each day. We also made a banner of what products we needed, when it started, and when it ended, and contacted Ms. Orr to have it posted on each TV around the school for extra advertisement. We re-posted the information about what to donate, when, and where to donate on our instagram and snapchat stories. The next thing we did was also printed out our flier and posted it around the school. We tried to mainly focus on placing them in stairwells and on each floor. We went to the office for approval of putting up the flyers around the school. We came into a conflict with student council and are finding our way through with Mr. Ferebee. We are still keeping in contact with Lori Smith and Mr. Welch on what they think and what all is still needed. We contacted Lori and she is helping us find better advertisements to help get more attention and hopefully more donations. We got our first donation of food on Wednesday from Nick Dwiggins. We also got a donation of $100.00 from Hampton Insurance Services to help supply families with a gift card to purchase a Turkey. We are still continuing to look for more donations! Next week we hope to collect some donations and continue our advertisement. We are still having to plan out further options of having to ask people for donations and reaching out to organizations around the community.
Week 4
So far this week we have met with Mr. Welch. We have decided we are going to join food drives and work together. He told us how he and Mrs. Lori Smith had decided to give families a thirty dollar gift card to let them go buy turkeys, so this also adds to the thanksgiving themed food drive. We have narrowed down the products that we need to produce a thanksgiving theme food drive. We have decided we need things like stuffing, cranberry sauce, prepackaged mashed potatoes, canned green beans, mac and cheese, corn, rice, canned fruit, pudding, and box dessert mix. Starting next week we decided we are going to begin a three week collection period. Throughout this time we will collect all the products that we said we needed. Before we begin we plan on making an advertisement to put onto the school announcements and other things around the school. We have found out that in order to get our advertisements around we need to contact Mrs. Koontz. Mrs. Koontz sets up announcements and she can help us get attention for our food drive. At the end of gathering all of the food and creating thanksgiving theme like baskets we have planned to go and deliver them to wherever they may need to go, Mr. Welch says he can guide us in what we have to do when it comes to delivering. We have asked other people about any ideas they could maybe help us with. So far someone has told us how we can ask businesses, churches, or other organizations to donate. I already have a planned donation of about $100.00 to help go towards buying the food needed. We are planning on getting more donations but we are having to figure out how that kind of thing works, considering neither of us have really ever done anything like this before. During week 3 of Genius hour Lauren and I explored new ideas and opportunities for our food drive. We stayed in contact with some helpful resources trying to figure out what way would be the most successful to pull off the food drive. We also worked on advertising and general organization.
To start off the week on Monday we got a response from Mr. Pruitt about our food drive. He expressed interest and was wondering if we were going to be doing this food drive through Hunger Fighters which is our school’s club that helps collect food to fight hunger. We explained to Mr. Pruitt that we would be contacting the leader of this group shortly and after speaking with him we will get back to Mr. Pruitt with any ideas or questions we have about advertisement through the school. The next thing we worked on this week is deciding if we would be able to stick to our theme of a Thanksgiving food drive to allow us to provide people with Thanksgiving dinners who cannot afford it. After consideration we decided that another good idea for our food drive would be if we did a “Holiday” food drive so students have more of a variety of foods they would be able to bring and so families can be helped throughout the entire holiday season instead of just one. We are still considering switching to this idea of just sticking with our original idea but we want to talk to Mr. Welch (Hunger Fighters leader) to discuss a timeline and what he thinks would be best after all of his experience. So overall after this week we have been pretty successful in getting some planning and work done for the project. We also had a little bit of time to set up our website through Wix and get that up and going. We are hoping by next week to have some more solidified plans and ideas for how we want our food drive/project to go. During week two of genius hour Lauren and I worked on many different ideas on how we can be successful throughout our project. This week we mainly wanted to focus on a timeline and how we can make this project idea feasible and how we can use our time wisley.
The first thing that we did this week was we created a google document to work on some important dates that we needed to figure out. We worked on creating a timeline for when we need to start the food drive and when we need to finish. We are still working through some of the logistics but we are trying to find the perfect amount of time that is needed to be successful on collecting enough canned foods to be able to supply families with a Thanksgiving meal. We are thinking 3-4 weeks of collecting should allow us to have a good turn out of foods as long as we advertise enough. The next thing we worked on was emailing some important people to start organizing the actual food drive and getting advice on how we should actually be successful. We contacted Mr. Pruitt about getting some advertising around the school and seeing if we would be allowed to collect the foods from students around the school. We are hoping to be able to meet with Mr. Pruitt the first of this week to work on these things. The next person we emailed to meet with is Mr. Welch who is a leader of the Hunger Fighters at Davie. We wanted to talk to him to get some advice on how to run a successful food drive and just get some overall advice from him. Another thing we want to do is see if he is doing any upcoming food drives or if he would be willing to help us out along the way as we are figuring this out. So overall this week we just wanted to create a timeline and figure out some advice from others who have experience and see if we would get some advertising around the school. For week one of our Genius Hour project we wanted to just make an overall plan on what we were thinking our project should consist of. So our project is that we are going to put together some sort of food drive to collect non-perishables and other essential items that are needed in the community around us.
Some of our ideas that we came up with in the first week were to help get as many people within the school involved by advertising it a lot around the school and also seeing if we would be able to get it announced on the morning announcements to encourage people to donate what they can. We would also appreciate it if teachers could encourage their students to donate to the community if they can. Regarding the actual food we were thinking about maybe collecting the non-perishables and toiletries through October and part of November. We were thinking it might be a good idea to encourage people to bring Thanksgiving related non-perishables like boxed stuffing mixes, mashed potato packets, canned veggies, and canned cranberry sauce. We were thinking that we could maybe provide some sort of list of the items like that and then also the toiletries because those are always needed. We thought this may be a good idea so that we could help everyone have a nice Thanksgiving dinner because we think it is an important holiday to spend with family. We were planning to then spend December donating the toiletries or maybe just doing a whole different drive during December that just collects the toiletries since it would already be separate from the Thanksgiving foods but we have not decided if that is too much yet. We would also use December to finish collecting data and editing our project to complete it. |
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