TO

SUN BEAR CORPORATION!
School Year 2001 - 2002

Where Learning is Our Business!

WHO ARE WE?

Sun Bear Corporation is a name we gave to our enrichment class.  We figured that since learning is our job at school, we could run our class like a business.  We have our own classroom economy, based on a merit pay system.  We get "paid" in play money each day. If we behave improperly, leave the room messy or fail to turn in accurate work on time, we have money deducted from our paychecks. We keep records of our accounts, make deposits into the "bank" each Friday, and write checks to pay for shares of stock in our mock stock market project.

WHAT  WE'RE   DOING

This year we are studying architecture and design through the Architecture And Children program. We learned about different kinds of buildings, different structures within buildings, and the history of New Mexico architecture.  We took a great field trip in October to downtown Albuquerque, where we saw many different historic buildings.  We got to ride a glass elevator in the Rosenwald Building, tour the La Posada Hotel and the KiMo Theater, and see where the FBI works . In November we had a bridge-building contest, and each student tried to build a toothpick-and-cardboard bridge that would hold six pounds.  We even learned about structure and function by making basic building structures with our bodies!

Here we are on our field trip:

This year we started a new service learning project to benefit the Animal Humane Association of New Mexico. The Little Bitty Bookstore is open each Thursday afternoon during recess, and we sell gently used children's books to the students, parents and staff of our school. The books come from the Animal Humane Super Thrift Shop and from students' donations.  All the money we raise goes to help homeless animals and educational projects at the Animal Humane shelter.  We learned to apply a lot of math,  including writing receipts, adding up charges, making change and keeping spreadsheets on the computer.  In the first month of operation, our bookstore earned over one hundred dollars!

Last year's intermediate class with a REALLY BIG dog at the Animal Humane Main Shelter

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Have you seen the Trail of the Painted Ponies? If you haven’t, you must not get out much! A couple of hundred talented New Mexico artists have been given free rein (pun intended) to express themselves with the blank figure of a horse as a canvas.  Now there are amazing, colorful ponies everywhere -- in the mall, in the airport, even outside the public restrooms in Old Town!

 Things like this tend to set a teacher’s brain humming.  In our society, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on what we do rather than who we are.  We pay a lot of attention to how we appear to others on the outside.  What if we were to think about a graphic expression of ourselves as we look on the inside?   What if we were to take that graphic expression and put it back into words?
 Thus was born The Trail of the Painted People.  Each student received a blank outline of a generic human being, and proceeded to fill in that being with graphic interpretations of their own personalities, hopes and dreams.  Each Painted Person is accompanied by a short essay explaining the meaning of each color and image.

See some Painted People!