Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Finishing Touches

The brochure has been finished! The final product turned out well. We used red and blue throughout the brochure to really bring in the Dominican flag colors. The brochure details our mission statement and who our class is. It also explains the child development centers that we will be working in. Our project is detailed as well along with some general facts about the Dominican Republic. Reach Out's contact information can also be found on the brochure. Brochures will be available at both athletic events and can be obtained by contacting Reach Out at sureachout@gmail.com.

The logo has also been made. It is simple yet still incorporates our project name and the school and Dominican Republic colors. We are going to have t-shirts made featuring our logo. This will be another way to help promote our project. Contact information will be put on the back of the t-shirts as well so people know where to find more information.

We will also be making stickers to be handed out at the school box drive at the Grace B. Luhrs Elementary School during the week of November 10-16. The stickers will have the Reach Out logo on it and will be handed out to the children.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Operations is rolling

The operations team is making good progress on developing our curriculum and wanted to update you on some of the ideas that we are moving forward with.
The topics that we are covering so far (as discussed at our meeting yesterday) are: classroom materials and common phrases/commands, food and table settings, computer and technology information, standard and complementary colors, body parts, the weather and how it coincides with the seasons, and the months of the year/days of the week.
The three components that we are keeping in mind when making these units is that they must be self-teaching, self-correcting, and re-usable. This will allow the most students possible to learn at the same time, while also allowing the teachers to circulate and reach all of the students.
In order to incorporate making "education/learning attractive" to the students, we are creating and adapting a lot of games and activities to our specific activities. One common way that we are accomplishing this is create a flashcard review/memory game for each unit.
Activities in specific areas so far include: velcro flip books for vocabulary words and common terms, a grocery shopping list and restaurant menu games, matching words to a diagram of a computer, having students create and share large family trees, a labeled doll house reconstruction, color wheels for every center, large body cutouts that can be labeled, a Simon Says game with the body parts, each center will be provided a re-usable calandar, and a Bingo game with the weather and seasons.
We have also devised a rotating schedule for the 5 centers to follow in order to share all of the curricular materials that we are providing. Making 5 seperate copies of each unit would cummulate in us transporting over 50 binders of material alone to the Dominican Republic. In order to maximize our energy and information output, we decided to have the centers work on a rotating schedule and will be counting on our liasons in the DR to help in transporting materials between the centers.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Strategy Team here...

We are on a roll with figuring out some ideas for more fundraisers and Dominican Day! The class is going to host a babysitting event (pending proper approval) for faculty and staff of Shippensburg. We will be hosting it in the Spiritual Center on December 5. More details to come!

Our group has talked a lot about what it means to be a success. Is it the number of children we affect? Is the number of people attending Dominican Day? Is it the amount of curriculum we each have the opportunity to teach? We'll be coming up with more ideas in the coming weeks about our measures of success. Let us know what you think is the best measure of success!

The other main focus has been on Dominican Day. We are very excited!! Don't forget to tell your friends and professors!

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Financing Reach Out

The Finance team is made up of four accounting majors, and it is our duty to support the overall class mission of enhancing and supporting domestic and international educational programs through establishing local partnerships while emphasizing cultural understanding. More directly, the mission of the finance committee is to provide the necessary monetary support required by the created project, Reach Out: Enhancing Education in the Dominican Republic. The goals of the finance committee are:

· To utilize the individual knowledge and skills of each group member to research anticipated project costs and create a functional budget

· To develop a strategy to obtain the necessary funding

· To monitor actual spending against proposed budget

· To communicate with other committees about potential fundraising events

· To coordinate the travel arrangements to and from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

At the beginning of the class, we did a lot of research, set up a budget, and determined that costs for implementing the project are going to be approximately $10,000. In order to offset the costs for each student, we have applied for several grants and have held one fundraiser so far.

As stated previously in the Pompoms and Athletes post, we will have another pom-pom and ribbon fundraiser at the home football and volleyball games on November 7th, so please come out and support Ship sports and learn more about our project!

Also, we are having benefit nights at Fuddruckers in Chambersburg on November 11th and 12th during their hours of operation! A percentage of sales those days will be donated directly to Reach Out. If you would like to come out and support our cause at Fuddruckers on those days, please send us an email at sureachout@gmail.com requesting a flyer (a portion your sales won’t donated to Reach Out without a flyer).

If you would like to make a tax deductible donation to support our project, simply go to http://www.sufoundation.org/opportunities/funds, click on Honors Program Colloquium, and click Donate Online.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The Operations of Reach Out

The operations team is make up of 5 education majors, and our objective is to create a sustainable curriculum for the child development centers in the DR based on their needs while creating partnerships locally.
At our last meeting, we decided on three areas of curriculum to focus on based on our feedback from Paquita. These areas are technology training, basic English education, and activities to make learning fun for students. Because the students have computers at the centers but little knowledge about how to use them, we will create referral manuals on basic internet skills and word processing for ages 7-10 and 11-15. In addition, we would like to obtain a Spanish typing program by donation to improve the students' typing skills.
For English education, we will be teaching basic words and phrases focusing on five broad areas: classroom objects, things at home, weather and seasons, technology words, and food. The centers are interested in materials that can be reused numerous times, so we would like to have information for the teachers as well as several activities (flashcards, games, etc.) for every topic.
We plan to make bilingual labels for classroom objects (clock, door, etc) and large dry erase calendars among other things.
We have utilized our partnership at Grace B. Luhrs Elementary School by organizing a school supplies drive called Gift of the Heart. The school PTO (Parent Teacher Organizaion) will purchase materials like pencils and notebooks that the students can then purchase at the school store and give as a donation to the children in the DR. PTO will sew bags to make individual kits for the students, which we will then pack in our luggage. The store will be open from November 10th until the 16th. We also invite students to come to Dominican Day on November 17th, as Strategy explained below. Everyone at the school is enthusiastic about the project and the partnership.

Pompoms and Athletes

Our class table at Shippensburg's homecoming game was a little bit of a washout. The weather was less than ideal since it rained the whole day. There was not a large turnout as far as visitors to our table. Ribbons in the colors of the Dominican flag, similar in shape to the breast cancer ribbons, were available for a donation.

Fear not, though, because we will have a table set up at the November 7 football game. We will also be at the volleyball game on the same day. Both ribbons and pompoms will be available at these games. Members of the class will at the tables and can provide information about the project.

Also, both of these games are senior games so please come and support Shippensburg's senior athletes.

A brochure has been with information about the project. If you would like a brochure or more information please e-mail us at sureachout@gmail.com

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The Strategy behind Dominican Day!

The strategy team is made up of 4 Senior business majors. As members of the strategy team, our goal is to keep the project focus and provide structure. We are all excited about our project and look forward to seeing what we can accomplish!

At our last meeting we spent time discussing Dominican Day. Dominican Day will be an event for members of the Shippensburg University community, our partners, and students in the Luhrs Elementary School. For this event we hope to educate these audiences about the Dominican Republic and our project. We plan to provide many events to give insight into Dominican culture, while sharing the specifics of what we plan to do while in the D.R.

We began our meeting by discussing the portion of the activities that will be dedicated to the Luhrs Elementary School students. For the time slot from 3:00pm-4:00pm we will focus on these students. We have developed a list of stations in which the children will participate for 10 minutes each. An example of these includes creating flashcards which will have a word in Spanish on one side and the picture on the other. The kids will be able to learn the word in Spanish and also color the picture. Other stations may include Spanish lessons, Spanish games, mask making, writing cards with translations for children in the DR, checkers and chess, and an active activity which will soon be determined. We also reached out to Kady and Abby in the PR group about what this event will entail so that a flier can be developed to promote Dominican Day within the elementary school.

In regard to the main portion of Dominican Day, Jon has also been in contact with Dr. Moilanen about constructing the Dominican-themed posters that we will use for photo opportunities. We also refined the list of supplies and materials that we will need to budget for in order to make Dominican Day a success. Examples of the supplies that we will need include paper plates, glitter, yarn, glue, feathers, markers, crayons, construction paper, flashcard supplies, and additional materials that will support our provided activities.

We then discussed the activities and events that will make up Dominican Day for our partners and members of the Shippensburg community. These activities include mask making, Spanish lessons, Latin dancing, Dominican-themed food, tri-folds and a PowerPoint explaining our project along with important facts about the DR, an extra credit worksheet for Spanish classes, checkers, and a photo opportunity with a Dominican-themed background. We also discussed placing bins for donations at specific locations near the tri-folds that we create informing attendees about different topics and aspects of our project. Along the lines of getting food catered for the event, we are waiting to hear back from Chartwells, who we informed that there would be between 75 and 100 people attending the event. We hope that this is an underestimation, but do not feel that it is necessary to budget for more individuals because of the many additional activities we will be providing at the event.

We are excited to continue working on this and many other aspects of our project! The Strategy team is 100% optimistic and looking forward to all we can accomplish.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Public Relations Progress

The PR group consists of 4 members. Our mission is to effectively communicate and market our project to our target audience, the campus and local community, using several different forms of media outlets while maintaining the utmost professionalism. We are always working toward the project's central mission: To enhance and support domestic and international educational programs through establishing local partnerships while emphasizing cultural understanding.

Our group has its own goals which we are striving to reach.
-To inform the campus and local community of our project
-To keep the campus and local community informed of progress -including development in our project, upcoming events, and accomplishments
-To measure and evaluate results

Our group has made quite a bit of progress in the short time since class has started. To help get the word out about our project we have created this blog, made a Facebook page, and are in the process of designing a website.

As a class we are hosting "Dominican Day" in November. It will be located in the Shippensburg University CUB MPR. We encourage everyone to attend. There will be Dominican dance lessons, food, and even Spanish lessons. Our group has begun designing a flyer about "Dominican Day" which will be distributed around campus as well as to our various partners.

News releases are also going to be sent to various media outlets about our project and any events we have. The PR group is also making a brochure to distribute to our partners and anyone else who is interested in our project and is looking for more information.

Shippensburg University's homecoming is October 17, 2009. Our group has come up with the idea to make pom poms. Who doesn't love a pom pom to cheer on their team? What makes these pom poms relevent to our project are the colors. Both the Dominican flag colors and Shippensburg University's colors are red, white and blue. Our class will have a table set up at the homecoming game where you can obtain a pom pom for a donation to our cause. Please come out and show your support for our project as well as for our school!