Page 8 Excellence In Education Lincoln Daily News January 2025 “What does a million look like?” This is the question that started a 20-year tradition for Chester- East Lincoln fourth graders. In 2004, Linda Splain was looking for ways to help her fourth and fifth grade students grasp understanding of what a million really is. She decided that pop tabs would be the perfect item due to their small size and easy storage. By the end of the first year, her students were a fourth of the way there; they had collected 252,906 pop tabs. The second year they made it halfway to a million with 500,155 pop tabs. Now, Mrs. Splain was running out of room to store them. The classes loaded all 400 pounds of their pop tabs and took them to Ronald McDonald House in Springfield. Ronald McDonald House is a national organization that supports families when they have a child receiving medical care in the hospital. They provide meals, lodging, and other support services at no cost to the families. The pop tabs that are collected for the Ronald McDonald House are recycled to help raise money to support the families that stay there. CEL’s 2005 donation provided lodging for one family for up to 12 days. Pop Tab Tradition at Chester-East Lincoln teaches more than math Mrs. Splain didn’t stop there. Her and her class encouraged everyone they knew to keep collecting pop tabs. In 2007-08, they reached the one million mark with 1,118,987 total! Again, Mrs. Splain and her students kept going! In 2011, Mrs. Splain and her fourth grade class were recognized by Ronald McDonald House for collecting the most pop tabs in a contest against 26 area schools. That year CEL collected 482,700 pop tabs (the most in one year ever)! By her retirement in the spring of 2019, Mrs. Splain’s students had collected a total of 3,669,795 pop tabs. Throughout the years, she enriched her math class using the pop tabs to help her students understand place value, estimation, measurement, mass, and skip counting and built a concrete understanding of a million. More importantly, she instilled a sense of community and generosity by helping others. Continued --
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