CRESTVIEW — Students at Northwood Elementary School learned how to keep track of their progress, while helping others in need, during a recent canned food drive.
The second grade classes collected 763 non-perishable food items, donated to the Lifepoint Church food pantry for residents in need.
"We made it a competition and each class charted their results on a giant graph in the hallway," second grade teacher Nikki Thomas said. "The students graphed their results each day during math."
Several students involved found the competition to be beneficial.
Second grade student Brycen Clause, 7, said, “I learned that graphs are really fun.”
Fellow classmate Cheyenne Long, 8, agreed.
“When I looked at the numbers it was hard to see who had more cans, but when I put the numbers in the graph I could see the winner a lot easier,” she said.
In the contest, the teacher whose students collected the most donations threw a pie in the face of the teacher whose class collected the least amount.
Students in Erika Holt's class watched their teacher throw a pie in the face of Crystal Daniels.
Holt said the overall purpose of this competition was to fill in a educational need.
"The whole project started because our students struggled with graphing skills, mainly reading graphs and interpreting the information," she said. "I think (the competition) was a success because since this project, the students have showed improvement on assignments where graphs were involved."
In addition to furthering their education, Holt said the competition also gave students insight into giving to others.
"I think it was also a meaningful experience for them to load up the food and realize they were collecting them for someone else," she said. "Kids this age usually don’t see the world from a bigger perspective, so to collect things to give away to other people was another added bonus lesson."
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Northwood students learn through canned food donation drive (PHOTOS)