St. Olaf students offer Halloween fun for a good cause

St. Olaf School

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Courtesy of St. Olaf School

BOUNTIFUL — Amidst the ghosts, goblins and other Halloween creatures at the Annual Saint Olaf Halloween Carnival, the sixth-grade class offered an opportunity for carnival-goers to have fun and contribute to their service project, Rod’s Racing.

Maggie Wilson explained that Rod’s Racing is a charity established in 2012 to provide funds to enable orphans throughout the world with Down’s syndrome to be adopted. Children born with this disability are very often abandoned at birth.

"Mr. Pack, our teacher, read us a newspaper article about this organization and our class chose Rod’s Racing as the charity we wanted to support," Alexander Nuntapreda said.

Because the Halloween carnival was coming up, the class decided to increase their fundraising effort for the charity by hosting a carnival game that would draw the attention of the crowd and generate a lot of donations.

After many ideas, the sixth-graders decided on Eyeball Bounce. Riley Hill describes the game: "We taped paper cups on a table and put various kinds of candy in each cup. The idea of the game is to bounce an ‘eyeball’ into one of the cups and then the contestant would receive the candy in the cup."

The class worked diligently, painting Ping Pong balls to look like eyes and making posters with various sizes of eyeballs to attract attention. They set up the booth and the game and each student worked a shift, supervising the game.

Their success was even more meaningful to the class because their teacher was ill and wasn’t able to attend the carnival.

The students banded together, taking charge of all aspects of this fundraiser themselves, showing that they were a very responsible and capable group who were able to take the lead in ensuring a successful project for their charity. In a few hours they were able to accumulate $212 for the Down’s syndrome children supported by Rod’s Racing.

Courtesy of St. Olaf School