Collecting money at a sale of animal-shaped key chains that were made to raise funds for a charity are, from left, Tre Bartony and Jacob Book at Butler Catholic School. As part of new Common Core standards, students put together presentations on their chosen charities and made projects to use in fundraising sales.

Students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades at Butler Catholic School are in the midst of a yearlong project that both raises money for the community and teaches them to think and solve problems in the world outside the classroom.

Carol Dorcy, a teacher at Butler Catholic, said at the start of the project the 46 middle school students were randomly assigned to one of 10 groups and told each group had to find a local organization for which to raise money.

The project is part of the recently enacted Common Core standards.

Butler Catholic Principal Sister John Ann Mulhern said, “Common Core are standards raised nationally to help students be prepared for higher education and technical school.”

Each student group needed to create a proposal in a PowerPoint presentation outlining the reason it picked the organization, the history of the organization and its needs, and the item the student group was creating to sell to raise money for the group’s chosen organization, according to Dorcy.

Dorcy said the community organizations chosen were the Humane Society, the Blind Association, Wounded Warriors, Catholic Charities, the American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity and St. Vincent DePaul Society. Some organizations were chosen by more than one student group.

Once a proposal was approved, each group worked as a team to make the products for sale. Products included dog toys, blankets and key chains.

“This is the application of what Common Core is asking teachers to do,” Sister John Ann said. “That is, apply what Common Core challenges us to do.

“The students had to do research and apply thinking to split fact from fiction. They used their problem solving,” said Sister John Ann.

Finally the students advertised their products and wrote a brief commercial that was presented to the school. The next day, they held a bazaar in the classrooms and sold the items to the school community.

“It started at the beginning of the school year,” said Dorcy, “and we just had our bazaar on Feb. 1.”

Dorcy said the sales helped each group raise from $37 to $105 for their chosen community group.

But their work wasn’t done yet.

“The teachers, all of us got together and decided that we were going to allow the students to modify their projects,” Dorcy said.

“Some are going to pick a completely different product because their first product was too expensive to make or took too long to make,” she said. “Some are going to modify their advertising because their product was not interesting to the younger students.

“Nobody’s product was perfect. Everybody’s making modifications,” she said.

“A second bazaar will be held in June at the end of the school year.”

Middle school teachers involved in the project included Dorcy, Jayne Chobot, Kathy Frederick, Brittnee Madigan and Dyanna Boosel.