May Day Bird Club Activities
Our school holds annual "May Days" for students to kind of wind down before finals season, clubs have booths to sell stuff and other festivities like talent shows, music, food, and inflatable obstacle courses are held around. Something new this year was that students could hold individual workshops, so I signed up to make a workshop on bird collisions and what students could do to help prevent them. Technically it wasn't an actual Bird Club event but the other two leaders of the workshop were Bird Club members and we had a Bird Club poster so essentially it was a Bird Club event.
For your information here's the actual slideshow we used.
We started with this slideshow to explain the problem and what to do about it and ended with an activity to make bird collision stickers to prevent birds from colliding with windows. We used a type of translucent film that workshop participants could cut up and attach to windows by adding water.
Here's some photos of us leading the workshop too. And yes, I'm wearing a "Crow" shirt. I got it from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in April, thought it was appropriate
We also had a traditional club booth. It was definitely a complicated one but we made stupid amounts of money and attention from it so it worked well.
Here's a photo of us after May Day wrapped up, so we're missing a bunch of stuff
We sold "hummingbird food" (Hawaiian Punch) for $1.50 per cup, "birds' nests" (pretzel sticks and chocolate/candy eggs) for $1.50 per batch, and goes at the pictured dart board for $2.50, for a chance to play and win a prize (from center: guided bird tour, bird feeder, some food item, either bird collision prevention stickers or hot chocolate bombs, candy) and all of them ended up getting sold. The dart board was likely our largest money-maker, too, people kept lining up to play it. One 7th grader even stood up there and played (for free, with no possible prizes) for almost 2 hours.
It was really insane too, one group of middle schoolers actually haggled us to buy a partially full jug of Hawaiian Punch for $13, and another full one for $20. For context, we bought them on sale for $2.50. Even after we ran out of prizes for the dart game people kept lining up, even accepting (or specifying) cups with a few chocolate eggs. We almost ran out of eggs because of that, we only had a few weird M&M things and lemon candy eggs (and whole packs of peanut butter eggs that we had to sell wholesale to prevent allergy dangers). We made a total of $251, which is crazy. I think part of it was that the school just made too many tickets for middle schoolers to use so they just burned them all, we even got somewhere around $25 in "donations."
It was too chaotic to take photos during but here are a few near the end
We'll hopefully get the money in our official account soon, and our plan is to use it to buy binoculars to keep through the years. I'll update again once that's official!