Million tabs: Fourth-grade teacher, students complete 6-year project


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SALT LAKE CITY — A fourth-grade teacher and her students at Foxboro Elementary in North Salt Lake donated 1 million pull tabs from soda and other cans to the Ronald McDonald House, culminating a six-plus-year project that doubles as an exercise in place value for students.

Lisa Moller, a longtime fourth-grade teacher at Foxboro Elementary, first began her project with her class six and a half years ago. The goal, quite simply, was to see what 1 million of something looked like — the class chose pull tabs and began collecting. The students from her initial class are now sophomores in high school, but their vision was achieved in March 2015 as the cumulative total finally topped seven figures.

Moller used the project mainly as a math exercise, a way of illustrating place value for young kids who might have trouble fully grasping such large numbers.

“Place value is such a hard concept for kids to understand and to grasp at this age,” Moller said. “Doing it like this, they’re able to see just how place value works in mathematics.”

The project doubled as a community outreach effort, with the full collection of pull tabs donated to the Ronald McDonald House Friday night. The tabs will be recycled for cash, and the amount donated by Moller and her students will equal enough to support a 31-night stay at the facility for a family.

Contributing: Alan Neves

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