Pennies for Haiti

Thorburn - When Grade 3 student O'Shea Lafford heard that Thorburn Consolidated School was collecting spare change to help victims of an earthquake in Haiti, he went home and emptied out his piggy bank.
"I brought in my whole bank," he said, looking at the rolls of pennies the students have collected.
He's not the only one, either. The 282 students at Thorburn Consolidated brought in as much spare change as they could find, with donations from all classes totalling $1,203.67.
"We thought since we have such a good county, and we felt bad for the people in that country, we should do this, it makes us better citizens," said Eliza Snell, also in Grade 3.
A little spare change can go a long way. Grade 2 and 3 students took all the pennies they'd collected and lined them up and down the hallway outside their classrooms. There were rows upon rows of pennies, said Snell.
"We had a big penny parade to make it easy to count all of them," she added.
Counting the coins helped the students work on their math skills, as they stacked the pennies in groups of 10, then combined them to make rolls of 50 and finally counted the rolls to get their class totals.
The Grade 8 classes also used the pennies in their math studies as they worked out how many pennies they would need to reach from Thorburn to Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Since a Canadian penny has a diameter of 19 millimetres, and the distance from Thorburn to Port-au-Prince is 3,139 kilometres, the students determined they'd need 165,210,527 pennies.
The project was close to the heart of many of the students, who had heard about the devastation in Haiti after the earthquake struck.
"When the earthquake came, their families dies," said Lauren MacLeod, Grade 3. "I hope we have enough money for them to buy new homes and food."
Allyson MacDonald said she hoped the money she raised went to helping injured people.
"I hope they get medical care for all the people that got hurt and I hope they get the help that they need," she said.
The students said they felt good doing their part to help.
"I felt good that I was helping someone," said Megan James.