By Christine Briel / skaneatelesDesign

The State Street Horizons 5th grade students, Mrs. McQuiggan, Mr. Tom Seeley (Skaneateles Sunrise Rotary) and parent volunteers created a community service group The Early Act Program. Below is a video of the group talking about their Water project at Winterfest 2008 in Skaneateles, NY. The video and information were provided to SkanTalk by Tom Seeley - Thanks so much Tom!!

To read more on the group and their Water Project

WHAT: This group put together and ran a carnival of games at the Skaneateles 2008 winterfest up at the Community Rec Center on 1/26/08. All the games required the players to purchase tickets and there was a raffle for donated gift baskets. All the money raised from the games went toward a goal of $600 to purchase water filtration kits for people in Haiti and El Salvador. The cost of the water filtration kits range from $100 for a home to $500 for a school. All the kids worked in teams to create, build and run their carnival games. Since it was Winterfest it was very COLD that day, but the carnival had a lot of visitors and we all had a blast.

If you would like to donate to this program e-mail Tom Seeley at tws@mlsattorneys.com

WHERE: The carnival was set up on the front lawn of the Rec Center and each game had been built by the student teams. There was a small tent to cover the tables with the prizes and this was also a place to buy your tickets. Some of the games included: a marble maze where you raced to push your marble with a chopstick through a maze made fro pizza boxes, another game was bowling a tennis ball down a table toward frozen water bottles, an “ice” fishing pond, a slingshot/cup contest and an “iceberg” ring toss. A lot of people were going in and out of the Rec Center and stopped to play games and help us reach our goal.

WHEN: Mrs. McQuiggan told the students about the assignment and carnival in October of 2007. The students used Horizons class time to work on the project. Students built their carnival games at their homes. On the morning of 1/26/08, parent volunteers helped Mrs. McQuiggan, Mr. Seeley and the kids set up the carnival at the Rec Center and take it back down when the carnival was over.

WHY: When you need water just head to your refrigerator, faucet or maybe make a quick ride to the store. What you’re likely to get is clean water. Water is free for most people you know and comes in lots of different ways. Take a minute to think about how in some places like El Salvador and Haiti, water isn’t free for all. In many countries the residents don’t have the gift of fresh water. Every morning they have a serious job - they must find a source of water. Clean drinking water is not available for more than 1.7 billlion people on our planet. According to UNICEF, 4,000 children die each day from a lack of water. Two buckets of safe water is what UNICEF says is the bare minimum for a child for eating, drinking and basic sanitation to live. Water is a very important thing in our daily diet, but we might take it for granted because it is always there for us. These places need systems that are easy to use, don’t require any power source and will work for years. With the help of Mr. Seeley and some of his Rotary contacts the 5th grade Horizons Early Act project has been able to raise enough money to purchase water filtration systems for a school, some homes and to also provide flouride tablets to Dr. Lorey to help support his efforts to improve dental health in El Salvador.

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