One morning we read a classroom devotional by Joanne DeYoung about God's gift of worms. It mentioned the beneficial things that worms do for the earth. Mrs. VanTil mentioned a friend of hers who also teaches third grade who has a composting bin of worms in her classroom. The class became very interested. We did a little internet research and the class voted on whether or not having composting worms in our classroom is something that we'd be interested in. Though not unanimous, the class was largely in favor of the idea.
The first thing we had to do was get permission from Mr. Aldrich. The students wrote letters to him and hand delivered them to the office. The letters told him about the benefits of worms, he also asked them questions when they were in the office. (Note: Mr. Aldrich's only question to Mrs. VanTil was "Will they stink?" The answer is no. :-) He was impressed with how much the third graders knew!)
We made a big list of ideas of different ways our class could raise money. Some of the vetoed ideas were: asking our parents for money, having a singing contest, having a dancing contest, going door to door asking for money. We settled on two ideas that we thought would earn money and were reasonable for us to accomplish: selling dirt dessert and rainbow loom bracelets. The next several days were a flurry of bracelet making and designing signs and advertising.
Sale day was a great success thanks to the help of our parents who both made desserts, and came in to help us with sales. The morning was a blur! We sold out of desserts (some of the middle school students were disappointed) and sold a lot of rainbow loom bracelets. Students were assigned different jobs including manning tables, helping to hand out goods, and tallying sales.
After our sale we counted our money as a class. We had a lot of quarters! We raised approximately $130 dollars. It was more than enough to order a worm bin, worms, and a book about worm composting.