The CATALOG CANCELING CHALLENGE

Students who cancel 60 catalogs personally can join the ONE TREE CLUB and we’ll send you this patch.

By canceling 1 catalog, you stop 6 from production, figuring conservatively.

If 360 catalogs come from one tree (19 billion catalogs divided by 53 million trees per year), then canceling 60 stops 360 and saves one tree. Using this DOWNLOADABLE LOG (click here) kids can track their canceling and aim for 60.

We’ve started our third annual CCC at Park School, and kids are going door-to-door in their neighborhoods and asking relatives if they can cancel their catalogs! This new club idea is pretty inspiring to them…and they don’t even know yet that I’m getting patches made for kids who reach 60!

Let me know if you need me to send you patches for your kids by emailing CatalogCancelingChallenge@gmail.com. I have extras!

I sewed one patch to an old hat which looks pretty nice on my dog and my son!

And here’s our TWO TREE CLUB patch for any kids who cancel 120 catalogs or more!

Tags: Uncategorized by Ted Wells
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Jeny Randall from Tenacre Country Day School in Wellesly, MA sent in the following post about their spring CCC. Congrats to Tenacre 1st to 6th graders for cancelings 668 catalogs!

“How many of you get catalogs at home in the mail?” The students were settling onto the floor for our morning assembly and every hand went into the air. A few students offered estimates of how many they received: 3, 10, 5 a day. “So if we have 200 families at Tenacre, how many catalogs do you think we receive as a school?” The answer is a LOT!

Over the next four weeks, students eagerly canceled catalogs at home and ran to the science room before classes started to add their catalogs to the growing pile. Children stopped me in the hallway to update me on their latest cancellations: “Ms. Randall — I canceled 3 catalogs last night! I’ll bring them in tomorrow.”

In a friendly competition, each grade had its own stack, and thus the catalogs created a living graph demonstrating which group had canceled the most. 30 days later students poured in during recess to tally each grade’s accomplishments. 600, 610, 620… excitement grew as we counted the stacks and arrived at 668, 68 catalogs above our school-wide goal of 600. For their efforts students celebrated with 668 extra seconds of recess. While a second sounds like a short amount of time and canceling one catalog seems a small act — when they worked together our students were delighted
 to discover how much it adds up!”

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Here’s a recent Huffington Post article I wrote about 350.org … and my son’s connection to a few Atlantic Harbor Seals on our way home from the Boston 350 festival.

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