Today some of us got together at Jackson's house to prepare crafts for the Wild life Refuge fundraiser.  Anna and Jennene lead the group in making beautiful angels while the rest of us painted Christmas tree ornaments.  Thanks for hosting Jackson and Arran! 

Next weekend you can make a donation to help buy Hay for the animals and choose some of our craft items off the table :)  

Dunrobin Community Centre on Saturday, Dec. 8th.  Jasmine and Grace will be there from 2-4.

Constance Creek Wildlife Refuge

HELLO!

Scottybob here and as you may have seen, the others have shown you a little thing about CCWR. But I'm gonna tell you about our journey at CCWR!

So, when you get there the first thing you'll probably notice the alpacas. Yes, alpacas. When you get into the main animal part, you'll notice some pot-belly pigs which are actually pretty awesome because they had tusks! Small tusks, but tusks.

 This is one of the pigs, can't remember which is which... or their names. But if you look by it's mouth you'll see the tusks. I'M NOT CRAZY!

Moving on. There are 3 alpacas, which names I also can't remember! But you would be allowed to feed them (as long as you weren't in the pen) and when I di, I laughed because they would lick your hand and it kinda tickled...

But of course, I have to mention that there was HORSES! And ponies too. And if you got close enough, you could pet the ponies! But I don't think we have a picture of the ponies so lets just talk about the next part.

In the next part there was a barn with goats with straight horns, curly horns, long horns and short horns. And of course, you could pet them! But also among the goats were big HORSES AND DONKEYS! Of course, I enjoyed petting the donkeys and I bet that somebody also wanted to have a pet goat. Maybe. Put of course, since the animals got to roam in the open, you had to wear rubber boots or your least favourite shoes, because there was poop everywhere. If you visit, fair warning... WATCH YOUR STEP!

So how do they manage to feed the animals and take care of them? Well, they would go out for an hour and a half drive there and back, buy 250$ worth of hay and head back for another hour and a half! If you don't know how much hay it is...

And that's only the front side! Just saying, that only lasts for about a week. So put it together: 3 hours of driving, about 800$ a month and they go through all that hay in a week! So now you do the math, how much do they spend a year, I'll get you started 800x12=?... HAVE FUN!

So I would say that going there was pretty successful  Now, if you'd like to help out, you can donate things or stuff but that's not my job to tell! To kind of close this off, I want to leave you with a picture...

DERP

Helping the Animals

Some of the members of the Charity Group will be at this Craft fair in the afternoon at Dunrobin Community Center to help raise money for hay.  Hope to see you there.

We will have cards, Christmas ornaments, jewellery, book marks and more.... come check us out!

Milk Bag Project

Great meeting today Charity Group.  Here are some photos and additional information on The Milk Bag Project. (Using milk bags to make sleeping mats for those with no beds in places like Haiti)  Here are Leanne and Devin doing the first step, which is folding the milk bag into eighths on the long side. 

The next step is to cut both ends of the milk bag off and then cut what is left into 1 inch pieces. Here we have Pam and the Kormylo Kids (Jackie, David and Kelly) cutting the bags.

See our pile of cut milk bag pieces:



Next we take the pieces and open them up and loop them together.  We keep adding loops until we have about 100 of them strung together.  Then we place them all into a milk bag with one end sticking out so the crocheters can find the starting spot.  Here we have Quinn, Jacintha and Jackson looping together the plarn (plastic yarn)

Check out this link to access the local information.  It includes times of upcoming workshops and many more links on where the mats go and how to make the mats and this link has a video tutorial that shows the crocheting (although they use a different method for making the plarn first).

Thanks for a super meeting today and for all the help on the Milk Bags.  If you finish making your plarn, you can deliver it to our house or give it to me at school  if you are not going to try crocheting a mat yourself :)

Forces of Nature

Hello everyone!

This weekend (29-30) we had yet another pollution cleaning challenge for 'Cleaning the Capitol'. The area we chose was the forest of Katimavik E.S. We had a very succesful run of cleaning the forest with having 4-5 garbage bags, 1 third of a recycling bin and 2 boxes worth of broken glass.

Cleaning the forest took about 1 hour to cover about 2 thirds of the forest area and found a couple of things you might not find! You'd be surprised about the glass because it seems like once the drink they smash the glass bottles and just repeatedly do it in different areas because I found 2 bottoms of beer bottles, not a fun thing!

Before I move on to the aftermath, I just want to say good job to everyone who came out and picked up garbage!

Now, once we were done with the garbage, we had a group picture with the wheel-barrow of garbagness. Here's the picture for anyone who's curious.

You can count how many bags there are and correct me if you're that inclined in proving someone wrong today! As we moved on we had a snack that was almost to good to be true but it's a snack well deserved.

And if you want a closer look on the garbage. If you don't want to look at the pictures, just skip ahead.

 Of course, the Nestle was from the snacks but, it's still an achievement that we recycled it, not tossed into the forest!

Prove me wrong!

See the beer? My point exactly.

All in all, it was a successful day and it's not easy doing this! It's devotion and hard work that gets us here, not fun and games (except for the carnival day). And thanks for turning up everyone!

Thanks for reading!
-Scottybob

stand up to cancer (SU2C)

Hey everyone,
We were just watching some TV and see that there is a big American fundraising campaign on several channels tonight. Stand up to Cancer - funds go to research in preventing, battling and surviving cancer.
I tried to make a donation via the phone, so I could say, we had a fundraiser up here in Canada at the end of August and wish them all the success they could imagine.  As it turns out, the line was busy for like half an hour - I guess lots of people were trying to donate via the phone.  I ended making an on-line donation, but there was not place to add a comment - unless I was on the twitter universe.

So the point is, great job kids and see who else is fundraising for cancer and trying to remove it from our society.

Pamela Dixon

First meeting in July

Our first meeting was at the beginning of July at Quirk's house.  We decided on our first activity/event, took attendance, explained the Charity Group a bit better and the leader for the next meeting was chosen.  Our first activity was to pick up garbage in Cat Tail Creek.  We started by my house (Grace's) and went all the way to the "boat park".  (*Pamela here, we cleaned about 600 metres of the creek).

 It was fun and we collected four full garbage bags.  We found lots of things, even tiles and tire pieces?!!!  When we were finished we had a great snack and drink (*Hands were sanitized before eating and drinking).  We ended the evening with a cheer - "Go Charity Group!"

Wow, it's amazing how much can change in a week.  Last week at this time, we were busy planning the carnival   Pam and I were baking like crazy people and the kids were planning the last minute details on their activities.  Jasmine was printing tarot cards and memorizing fortunes, Scott was hunting for bowls and making rules for the soak station, Josh was filling balloons with prize tickets which was surprisingly tough, Matthew was getting a float for the raffle tickets and Devin was checking the baking to make sure it wasn't poisoned, Jay was using the air compressor to blow up about 40 balloons and Pam and Kevin were cleaning their garage from top to bottom to ensure success.  AND success it was!  It really seemed to me that people who came had a good time.  Not only did they have fun, but they were happy to spend their money and give to a great cause.

We were very fortunate to have some media representation attend our big day and the Canadian Dad wrote a very touching piece on his blog.  Pam, Jasmine and I all read and responded to the comments.  If you haven't read the comments, you should because you know what team, we really did inspire some other people to get active and start helping, so that is very cool.  We also had Blair from the newspaper come and we were published, not only published, but we made the front page and had a whole other page dedicated to our story.  That was an amazing feeling and think about how many other kids will see that and wonder what they could do to make the world a better place?

Tomorrow we go to the Cancer Society to drop off the cheque and it seems they too want to interview some of us to get a story for their newsletter or website.

Obviously, all this attention is not going to our head, ha, ha!  It feels good to be recognized for doing something special and we all need to stand back and realize we were just part of something truly inspiring.

I can't wait to see what you guys decide to do next.  Who is hosting the next meeting?  Let's aim for later in September once school has been in for a couple of weeks, so we know how much homework we all have.  I don't think any of you are in my class, so I'll have to see you at the Charity Group meetings.

Bye for now and thanks for all your hard work and effort.  $844 dollars worth!  WOO, HOO!