Look At Your Milk Photo Contest

Attention all Milk Revolution friends!  We are hosting a photo challenge.  Here's how you can participate:

• take a picture that shows a landmark near where you live or are visiting
• include our themilkrevolution.blogspot.com address somewhere in the picture (no digital manipulation allowed please)
• no copyrighted or watermarked pictures or innappropriate images will be accepted
• all pictures give permission to be placed on our blog for viewing by others
• please include your name and location, compress your photo and email to themilkrevolution@gmail.com
• Contest closes at midnight May 27, 2011.  Winners will be announced May 31, 2011.

Prizes have been created and selected by the grade four students.  Our criteria for judging a prize was that it has to cost $0, be sent by mail in an envelope or online, be of interest to others.  Pictures will be judged on colour, detail, interest and creativity.  Winning photos will be posted on our blog at the beginning of June.

We look forward to all the exciting photos.  Have fun and spread the word!

Spreading the Word

We are spreading the word about the added sugar in flavoured milk and today we took our campaign to the street, literally.  It has been a very busy week at school.  Students in our class keep writing their ideas and emailing them to Mrs. Swelander.  We have been going through all the suggestions from classmates, schoolmates, teachers and our blog followers and evaluating which ideas would work best for our school.  There is a special writing committee working day and night on a "Top Secret" mission and hopefully that will be on our blog by the end of next week.

So, today we stepped out onto the street in front of our school and held up our signs.  We got lots of waves and car honks, but we also learned some very valuable lessons.  We thought you might learn from them if you decide to run a similar campaign at your school.
1.  Don't do this on a windy or rainy day.  We're speaking from experience.
2. Attach letters on the top and bottom of the paper so the pages don't curl up.
3. Spell the word correctly.  Double check that all letters are right side up.
4. If you are part of the word "glass" (see the picture below) make sure the last three people stay close to the rest of the word, or else it just looks bad as you're walking up the stairs into the school.
5. When recording the students, turn the camera off before yelling at them from across the street.

Be sure to check in Friday, April 29 for our next "Spreading the Word" idea.   It will be fun for everyone.

Our Current School Situation

We think our followers need some information about our school, so they can understand the changes we are trying to make.  Our school has kindergarten through grade six and has about 220 students.  Kindergarten students only come to school for half a day so we have a morning and afternoon class that does not eat lunch at school at all.  Our school is an Earth 3 school which means we've completed 3000 environmental projects in the past few years.  Students have the choice to stay at school for lunch or go home to eat.  All of the students who eat lunch at school bring their own lunch from home.  We have microwaves to heat food, but most students don't use them.  Students eat in their classrooms (homerooms) or designated lunchrooms where they are supervised by our lunchroom supervisor team.  Students can choose white or chocolate milk and order their milk at the beginning of the year either by paying for the whole year or buying milk tickets.  In our class most of us never saw the form and were not asked by our parents which type of milk we would choose.  Some parents were suprised to hear they had a choice or how much sugar is in the chocolate milk.

We surveyed our students to find out how many of the milk drinkers drink chocolate milk.  This is our graph showing how many students in each grade currently have chocolate milk as their order choice.

We spoke to our principal about how to change the milk orders.  It takes about two to three weeks to switch the orders, but she agreed that if we can convince students to change their milk choices, we can switch our milk order by mid-May.  That means we have to convince students AND the parents!

We have plans to share our information.  The next parent council meeting is May 10 and we plan to send some students to that meeting.  We are also planning a schoolwide blitz of education about our milk.

Stay tuned for further developments.