Harmony Team Collects $2,253.82 for Holiday Family

Once again, our Harmony Team kiddos astounded us by collecting $2,253.82 for the family we adopted for the holidays. We were able to provide a wonderful holiday season for our family. The kids were amazing, collecting from friends, family and neighbors. Some kids even did fundraising events. We like to incorporate service into our team culture and this is our big service project for the year. We will also be doing some smaller service projects as the year progresses. Harmony Team is indeed "the little team that could".

This total is not unusual for Team Harmony. In the ten years that Team Harmony has been in existence, we have surpassed $1,500.00 every year. That is our longstanding goal. In the ten years that we have been collecting for Holiday Families, we have raised a total of $20,765.26. Incredible! How does this year's team rank against all of the other Harmony Teams in terms of Holiday Family collections? Below is a chart of all Harmony Team Holiday Family collections including the all-time rank in parentheses. Congratulations to all of the students and families that helped make this possible.

Holiday Family Collections by Year

2015 - 2253.82 (2)

2014 - 2068.68 (5)

2013 - 2243.53 (3)

2012 - 3228.82 (1)

2011 - 1847.03 (7)

2010 - 2197.16 (4)

2009 - 1686.35 (9)

2008 - 1733.24 (8)

2007 - 1996.40 (6)

2006 - 1510.23 (10)

Total - 20765.26

Monday Memo: Pitch Day and Holiday Family

Next Tuesday is Pitch Day, one of the high-stakes days of our 20% Time projects. Kids will pitch their ideas to the committees. Each student will have five minutes to show their commercial, talk to the committee and answer questions. We expect that most kids will be very prepared for this event and will experience great success.

Our Holiday Family collection is up to 1453.82. This is an incredible effort by the kids and we will still collect through Monday. Any families that purchased items from the list should send those in by Monday. We will be wrapping gifts on Monday. If you have extra gift boxes, we could use them. Thanks for all of your help in making this a success. BTW, as part of our collection, we auctioned off the street signs in Eckert's room and the kids who won those may take them home at the end of the school year.

Grades close next Friday which is the end of the semester. The semester grade is a final grade and of course, no make-ups or redos can occur after that. Kids need to make sure that everything is turned in by then.

#StuCamp, Holiday Family and Skating

Tomorrow, Harmony Team is participating in #stucamp, a national student edcamp. We have run two very successful student edcamps on team so far and this is a chance for our kids to teach and learn from middle and high school students from around the country. We are very excited to participate in this first annual event. We are using an app developed at MIT called Unhangout. We'll have a wrap-up blog post on our other blogs telling how it all went.

Our kiddos are going ice skating on Monday and Wednesday. They should bring a coat, tall socks and gloves. Skating costs $3.00 and kids can bring that to the gym teachers before or after school.

Our holiday family collection is at $1179.33 so far. We have eight days left to collect. Collections end on December 11. Many kids have asked for a letter from us about our holiday family collection so we made that available to anyone who asked. The kids are motivated to close our our fundraising in a big way! So far, this experience has been awesome!

We are collecting food items for our annual Holiday Baskets. We give baskets to district families in need. We appreciate any donations you can give. The link to sign up for a food donation is here (Food Donation Link). If you would like to nominate a family to receive a basket, please e-mail Sarah Bodi or Linda Peterson in the counselor's office.