Help students pop open their Earth Banks and fold end tabs.
Collect pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters at school and at
home.
Optional: Send banks home with a short note to parents.
As banks are returned, invite students to pour their coins into
your classroom bank. Encourage students to fill their banks again
and again.
Count money and send your donation to Earth’s Birthday
Project with the Contribution Form. Allow at least four weeks for
your honorary certificate to arrive!
Tips to make your Earth Bank coin drive more successful
and more educational.
Ask parents to match a portion of the money you raise.
Have students prepare a presentation on rainforest protection
and how coin collecting can help save the rainforest. Invite parents
and other classes.
Remind students that they can fill their banks more than once.
Let students know how well the drive is progressing. Use your
classroom bulletin board, PA system, or closed circuit TV to make
the announcement.
Set a goal and create a large graph charting the coin drive’s
progress to display in your main hall.
Encourage a local bank president or business owner to prepare
a check equal to the amount raised and turn your success into a
media event. Invite local reporters to cover your story.
Provide incentive. Throw a party to celebrate the success of your
coin drive. Serve pizza or ice cream donated by a local retailer—or
spend the afternoon playing miniature golf or bowling.
Make coins the object of a math and science lesson: count, weigh,
graph your progress, estimate, record, analyze, and compare data.
Research the history of pennies and other money and learn how coins
are made. At the end of your coin drive, count the money you’ve
collected and calculate how many acres of rainforest you can adopt!
Art: You and your students can create original posters and
design collection containers to advertise your coin drive. Students
can express their feeling for rainforests and rainforest animals in
drawings, paintings, collages, and clay sculpture and use these visual
aids when they explain the importance of saving rainforests to their
friends and families.
Language Arts: Your students will need persuasive
language to encourage people to make donations. Work in a group to
list all the important things you can say about the rainforest. Try
to make your message both clear and heartfelt. Practice language skills
by making presentations about the drive, creating a poster, and asking
friends and families to support the coin drive with contributions.
Decision Making: To make your coin drive successful,
you and your class will need to make a number of decisions. This is
an excellent opportunity for students to learn the power and consequences
of sound decision making. As your drive progresses, discuss options,
pros and cons, and possible outcomes. Work with your students to answer
the following questions:
What goal do we want to reach? How many acres do we want to adopt?
Should we give our coin drive a name?
What kind of advertising should we do? A poster? Announcements?
Should we collect coins at school? At home?
Should we make coin collection containers to place in locations
around school or around our community? Where would people be likely
to make donations (for example, at a nearby dry cleaners or at a
church)?
How long should the drive last?
How often should we count the change we're collecting?
How often should we turn it in?
Penny Math: Pennies and other coins lend themselves
to all kinds of mathematical computations. Use pennies to count, weigh,
graph/chart, estimate, record, analyze, and compute data.
Weigh 50 pennies. Weigh all the pennies your class collects.
Estimate the total number of pennies collected from their weight
and calculate the value. Estimate the weight of different amounts
of pennies—$.45, $4.50, $45.00, etc. Estimate how many pennies
would be in a given weight.
Have students select 5 pennies each. Ask them to write down the
dates of their pennies and calculate out how old each penny is.
Have students line up enough pennies in a row to equal a foot.
Ask them to figure out how many pennies there would be in a yard,
in six inches, in a mile. When they have counted all the pennies
collected in the coin drive, have them calculate how long a line
they would make.
At $45 for 9 acres, how many acres can you save with the money
you've collected? What fraction of an acre will one penny save?
Convert all your measurements to metric amounts.
Acre Math: An acre is exactly 4,840 square yards or roughly
70 yards by 70 yards. Use string, small stakes, and a yardstick or
carpenter's rule to mark off an acre on your playground, an athletic
field, or a park.
Social Studies/History: Learn everything you can about coins
and the history of money. Start with some facts about pennies.
The first penny was made of silver and was minted in 785 AD by
command of King Offa of England.
The first copper penny was minted in England in 1798. It was
known as a cartwheel because of its large size.
The first U.S. penny was the Fugio cent, minted in 1787 in New
Haven, Connecticut. On one side was a sun, a sundial, and the words
“Fugio” (the Latin word for “fly”) and “Mind
Your Business.” These words were attributed to Benjamin Franklin,
and the coin was often called the Franklin cent.
Since the Fugio cent, more than 300 billion pennies with eleven
different designs have been minted in the United States.
There are more than 130 million U.S. pennies in circulation today!
A lot of them are in jars in peoples homes, waiting to be dropped
into Earth Banks!
Design your own coin. What words and pictures would you like to put
on a penny or a quarter? What important person, place, event or idea
would you like to commemorate? How about a rainforest penny?
