Blog 3

I currently work at an elementary school.  Last month I sponsored the annual food drive.  I made a flyer for students to bring home so their parents would be aware of the food drive.  The flyer was printed on red paper and had a picture of a can of Campbell’s soup.  The flyer also had a boarder to make it look less empty.  I believe this made the flyer visually appealing and helped grab the attention of the students who cannot read yet.

One negative thing about the can of soup was that some students did not want to read the actual message and assumed that only cans of Campbell’s soup could be donated.  In actuality, any unrefrigerated food could have been donated. One problem with the food drive was that I had to turn in the total donations in terms of ounces.  It was easier for me to keep a log of the ounces as the cans were donated than count thousands of cans at the end of the food drive.

Some parents seemed confused because they were not aware of why we did our food drive in ounces.   I wish I would have made the end date of the food drive longer because I had some students turn in food after the deadline.  I would have added the deadline on the flyer.  I needed all donated food in by 11:00 a.m. on Friday because I had to have my totals in by 2:30.

I would have also added as an FYI that all food donated must not be expired because some of the food that was donated had to be thrown out.  We had a huge response.  In one week, we had collected over a ton of food. This surpassed the previous years totals.

I believe that the flyer was an easy and cost effective way of informing parents about the food drive and how to become involved in it.  The flyer I made was effective, creative, and only took around 10 minute to create.  I definitely plan on using a word processor to create more flyers in the future for the students at my elementary school.  I also plan on choosing Clip Art for the flyers as relevant to the cause as possible.  This way, the students will have a good idea what the flyer is about without reading it.

As an alternative to Clip Art, I could also use pictures off of the internet.  Microsoft Word makes it easy to insert a picture.  One way is copying the image from the website and then pasting it to the document.  You can then change the properties of the picture if resizing is needed.  I have used this technique when making a certificate I gave to the students that achieved high reading marks at my school.