During our visit, Mrs. Katherine Uhler showed us all the raptors at the center and explained why each of them was there.  Throughout the visit we took many pictures and lots of notes about each raptor we saw.  At the end of the visit, our team knew we wanted to sponsor an owl.  When we got back to the school, each team member chose an owl we saw and organized our information so we could share what we had learned with the kindergarten students.

It was decided that we would make a presentation on the four owls selected with the kindergarten children during our school’s lunch periods.  Each team member spoke about an owl, shared its picture, and tried to make the students at the school want to vote for "their" owl. 

After our presentations, a ballot was made and distributed to all the students in the school during homeroom.  It was important to us that everyone in the entire school could vote.  When the votes were handed in, our team had to count ALL the votes.  Soon, we had found out that the Great Horned Owl had won.

Next was money collecting time.  The kindergarten students had big buckets outside of their classrooms to collect pennies and spare change.  We spent our lunch periods collecting spare change.  Every day the kindergarten students counted their pennies.  To do this, they used a special sheet that one of their teachers put together.  Click here.  The children had to count out ten pennies and then put them in a pile.  Once they had ten piles of ten pennies, they knew they had 100 pennies and they placed them in a sandwich bag.  Every day they counted to see how many bags of 100 pennies they had collected.  Then one of us would record the results on our bulletin board in the school lobby.  We collected money for one week.

We wanted to build excitement in the school so we made a bulletin board in the main lobby of our school. It kept everyone up to date on what was happening with the project.  At first, it just told everyone that the 100^th day would soon be here and we would be collecting pennies  for a service project.  Then it had pictures of the four owls that the kids could vote on.  On the morning of the big vote, everyone was looking at the bulletin board.  After that, when the winner was decided, it showed everyone how the penny collection was going.

At the end of the project we had collected $315 for the Great Horned Owl.  Mrs. Uhler was very pleased when we gave her the check.  The money will be used for medicine, food, and any other care the Great Horned Owl requires.