Past projects 8
The Spark of Learning!
Funded May 4, 2021Thank you so much for supporting our classroom through these last few tough years. Your donations have allowed our students to explore new career opportunities and different industry technology. The multimeters that you helped us purchase are allowing our students to explore electrical circuitry and electrical systems. Using test circuit boards we have in our inventory, the students were able to trace the path of electricity through the circuit board. They were also able to explore how resistors change electricity as it travels through them.
When our students first saw the multimeters they were very excited. Up until this point we did not have enough equipment for all of our students. We also had very old and partially functioning equipment. Your donation allowed us to replace all of our old and broken equipment so that now each student has their own multimeter to conduct the lab.
In the future these multimeters will be used for other projects and classes. The plan is that in the Spring the multimeters will be used by our shop classes during their construction unit. In that unit they will explore residential electrical wiring. The multimeters will allow them to test voltage, and continuity.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
This classroom project was brought to life by SONIC Drive-In and one other donor.Distant Dissection
Funded Dec 31, 2020Thank you so much for supporting my Animal Science Class. This school year has been a wild one, filled with ups and downs and yes even some memorable moments. For my Animal Science students it will most definitely be a year they will not forget. Thanks to your help they were able to each carry out a dissection of a fetal pig.
The most memorable part of the dissection for my students and I was when they first received their personal specimens. We had reactions from pure fascination, to disgust, to intrigue to yes even some gagging. After the initial shock, the students quickly settled in to the lessons which spanned several weeks.
We were able to explore every system and most structures within the animal, from the oral cavity, to the respiratory system, to muscle structure and attachments. This dissection was the capstone of the semester where they could apply the knowledge they gained from previous book work in a real world specimen.
Thank you again for support. You have truly blessed my class and given them a moment in their education they will never forget.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
CTE Tools
Funded May 19, 2020I might not have to say it, but 2020 year was a weird one for teaching and for our graduating Seniors. In March they left school for Spring Break and then were not allowed to return. As you might have guessed, missing the last three months of your Senior year was difficult on them but they all took it in stride.
One of the greatest things that happened to this class was the way that you and the community gathered around our Seniors to make a difficult ending to the year memorable. Your support of this project allowed me to go out and purchase career based gifts for each graduating senior in my program. I carefully selected each gift with their future career path in mind. The gifts ranged from dissection kits for one student heading into Animal Science, to pruners and loopers for another who was entering a Horticulture program.
My Seniors were quite surprised to receive tools for their trade for graduation. Hidden behind masks, you could see signs of smiles and excitement. On their behalf I would like to say thank you for making this year end on a happy note. Your gift has been the genesis of a new program in my department where we are working to establish a fund to purchase tools of the trade for all Seniors who graduate. Thank you for helping us get started in this endeavor.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
This classroom project was brought to life by #GraduateTogether and 2 other donors.Biscuits and Plate Joiner Gravy
Funded Mar 27, 2019Thank you for contributing to our campaign to allow us to purchase a plate joiner. We have had limited opportunities to use this tool in the shop this school year. However, we are looking forward to Spring semester when we start working with wood products in our shop again. Right now we are limited to only metal working due to fire concerns, but we have several students who are in the planning stages for Spring wood working projects that will use the plate joiner. One of the planned projects involves several of our tools we have received from Donor's Choose.
On our campus we had two Incense Cedar trees removed last Fall as a part of a career day. The logs from these trees were salvaged and sent to a near by school for milling. The milled lumber was returned to us and has since dried over the Summer and is ready for us to plane with our thickness planer. When done we will as a group be building a cedar hope chest using this lumber which will be held together by the joints made by the plate joiner. We will laminate to the boards with the joiner to create the sides of hope chest together.
Without your gift we would not be able to tackle a project like this. Thank you again for your gifts to our classroom.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose.org Community and 3 other donors.Success by the Thousandths
Funded May 13, 2019In the time between when we completed this campaign and the items were able to be ordered the products we had selected went out of stock. Instead of this being an issue, it turned out being a great benefit. We were able to select a new brand of tool for this campaign and ended up being able to purchase 8 sets of micrometers. The new sets each had three micrometers in them meaning we can teach up to 24 students at a time on the use of micrometers.
Having the ability to place micrometers in the hands of each of my students in my class has been a wonderful. We no longer have to take turns to work with the limited quantity of older damaged equipment. Now we have new completely functional tools we can use not only for training in how to read them, but also can use them as accurate tools for measuring engine components in the shop.
Thank you again for contributing to our campaign.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose.org Community and 8 other donors.All On The Same (Wood) Plane
Funded Jan 16, 2019Thank you for helping us reach our goal for adding a thickness planer to our shop. Up until this point we have been limited on how we construct furniture in our shop. We did not have a tool to make all of the boards the same thickness. This means that any furniture we made would have to be rough or rustic in style. Now that we have a thickness planer, we can make fine furniture such as tables with solid wood tops, boxes and other things that require uniform thickness of wood.
The addition of this tool has also inspired some of the students to create furniture for themselves. One student has been working all semester building his own futon frame. He has used the thickness planer to resurface reclaimed lumber. This has allowed to him to build his project merely for the cost of fasteners as all of the lumber was given to him at no cost. Some of this lumber was also old growth timber which can no longer be purchased in our area.
Our thickness planer was also a necessary tool to have with our wood lathes. We needed to have the capability to create composite wood blanks for turning. This technique uses several small boards that are all planed to an equal thickness then glued together in rough shape. Creating composite blanks allows us to build larger wood shapes for turning bowls, plates or decorative spindles for furniture.
Thank you again for all that you have done for our classroom and shop. Without donors like you we would be quite limited on the projects we would be able to do.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
A New Spin On Woodworking
Funded Dec 25, 2018Thank you so very much for the gift that you have given our students. It is hard to put quantitative amount on the difference this donation has made to our program. The wood lathe was the first and definitely the most important change we had this Fall. It kicked off a firestorm of change in everything from the amount of available tools to the attitudes of the students themselves.
When I started teaching in the shop this Fall, I frequently ran into issues with tooling, from broken tools, to missing parts, to simple lack of numbers of tools. It was nearly impossible to teach any technical skills in the shop. I made do as best as I could and the students knew it. They told me, "That's O.K. Mr. Ross that is just how our school is, everything is broken." I knew that those words really said more than our lack of quality tools, it actually trickled through to how the students felt about themselves, how they felt others perceived them, and how much little they thought the community cared for their shop space. They knew it, and I knew it the program itself was broken.
Thankfully a fellow teacher and very dear friend introduced me to the Donor's Choose platform and I embraced it fully as a way to fix our program. If everything was old and broken, we need new tools and not bargain basement tools, but tools of quality that would last for many years of hard use in a classroom. So with that idea in mind I set about creating our first campaign. I chose what I saw to be the oldest power tool in the shop, which due to its condition was not being used, and selected that to be replaced first.
That is where you came in. Your donation, coupled with others, quickly helped us reach our funding goal. I have to say I was very pleased in how quickly our funding goal was reached. I was actually caught off guard as I had figured it would have taken many weeks. I will even admit as a hardened old shop guy, that it brought tears of joy to my eyes to see how much others cared about our students.
In the time that has passed from the initial funding, our program has been utterly blessed with donations and assistance. We have received nearly $5,000 of additional donations in the form of grants, gifts of tools and other successful Donor's Choose campaigns. As a result our entire shop has turned around. Our tool cabinets have filled with hand tools and our benches have been crowned with power tools. Most importantly, in the last two months I have not heard a single student tell me that things in the shop are broken, because that is how their school is. Instead they have actually told me that the tools are too nice to have in our shop and that I should take them out. To which I tell them that they are to be used, not hidden. As a result, our floors are covered in sawdust and our tables are full of projects.
In the packet I have also included an excerpt from our local newspaper featuring our shop. The article features a half dozen wood lathes that were loaned to us for this semester by a local art school. That loan of tooling came as a direct result of us receiving our new wood lathe. They heard about us receiving the lathe donation and augmented it by allowing us to have enough lathes to teach a full class at once. The loaned lathes will leave soon, but our own lathe will stay and continue to be used by generations of students to come.
Thank you again so very much for your donation and making this all possible,”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross
It's Time to Drill Down!
Funded Feb 13, 2019Adding a small drill press dedicated to wood working has greatly helped my shop layout. Up until this point we were sharing one drill press between both our wood working and metal working sides. This lead us to have issues with oils and cutting fluids from the metal cutting seeping into wood projects. Once contaminated with oil, these wood projects had to be scrapped. To combat this we were completely cleaning the drill press table with solvents something which was hazardous and not easily done.
After receiving our drill press from our fundraising campaign we completely eliminated the issue of oil contamination. It has allowed us to have one drill press dedicated to woods, and one to metals. Now we are able to create high quality wood working projects that can be finished with fine wood finishes and no longer have to thoroughly clean the drill press in between.
My students have also gained skills using the new drill press by learning how to make custom work holding jigs. These jigs have been used to make projects requiring multiple parts to be made identically for large projects. We have also made a few jigs to hold one off parts that cannot be held by normal vise setups.
Overall the addition of a new drill press to our shop has been extremely positive. Thank you all for your gifts.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ross