Have a Heart to Get a Heart

I know this picture looks very Valentine's Dayish, so I probably should explain.  At my school, I decided to lead my club in a fundraiser for earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan.  I wanted to do something simple, such as the red-bucket-type-thing that the Salvation Army does every Christmas season.  But, since this is middle school, I also wanted to give a little tiny incentive for students to donate.  Clint helped me to brainstorm ideas, and here is what I ultimately decided to do:

For every quarter students donate, my club is giving them one of these mini heart charms (I purchased these from Oriental Trading Company for incredibly cheap).  The charms link together to form a chain, and students can display these with pride on their backpacks, or wear them as jewelry.  Well, that was the idea, anyway.  I have students who have used them as hippie headbands, belts, and even decorations for their sunglasses.  But the idea is, the more you donate, the longer your chain will be.  On Wednesday of next week, the seventh grader and eighth grader with the longest chain gets a thank you gift, which is a tiny glass angel holding a heart (we're calling it an "Angel of Mercy" figurine).  To collect donations, my club created a giant box with the American flag on one side, and the Japanese flag on the other.  The box, of course, has a nice fat slit on top.  We just kicked off our fundraiser today during lunch, and it's off to a great start!  The kids love plunking their quarters and dollars into the box, and they are already going wild for the charms, even though they are just these tiny cheap plastic things.  And it's all awesome because all of this money will be given to the American Red Cross. 

The rest of my day was a complete whirlwind, but my poor empty stomach is growling so loud that I can barely concentrate on blogging.  I'm going to indulge in a gourmet peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich now and then zone out on some mindless sitcom.

P.S.  I almost forgot to mention, my students wanted to come up with some kind of logo for our fundraiser, and our first idea was "Come and get your heart on."  But read that out loud once or twice to yourself, and you'll understand pretty fast why that one doesn't quite work out (oops).  We settled for "Have a Heart to Get a Heart" instead.