Situation Report

Working with third graders has proven to be one surprise after another.  Our group has currently met with all three third grade classes as a whole twice and both times, they have come up with such amazing ideas, I find myself blown away. Our initial meeting with the students began by showing them a video that Raihan found which featured a group of students in Australia who had done a number of impacting things in their classroom to help the world.  The students were immediately inspired and came up with amazing ideas for how they wanted to impact their community.  We asked them to generate their thoughts on what problems they saw around Gainesville that they wanted to help with.  After this initial meeting, we compiled the list of the children's concerns and decided to go with a majority consensus.  We discussed with the children that we would be voting on one topic, so we knew that they would be alright with the idea of only focusing on one specific area of  concern.  They were so excited to be helping the needy around Gainesville.  So far, our project consists of three crews that will be working on different areas of a major donation drive.  We are going to be collecting items to donate to the Arbor House for homeless single mothers in Gainesville.  The three crews of our project are going to be a news crew, responsible for documenting and creating a finalized video of the entire project, a website crew, responsible for creating the project website that will display what we have been doing and the goal of our project, and finally an outreach crew, which will be responsible for collecting donations and making the community, local businesses, etc aware of our mission.  I personally am going to be in charge of the news crew and helping students design and create the video that will be a representation of our final project. I’m so excited to see that the homeless and needy around the area is such a high priority for them and am really ready to get started working!  I’m a little concerned about the level of involvement this is going to take because right now, it’s a lot to comprehend and “rap my head around” but I am confident that my group and I will be able to work together to figure it out. So far, everything has been going GREAT!!