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Posted by Phil Van Kampen on Friday, 20 November 1998, at 8:23 a.m.
Greetings from the Wolverine State,
We are a class of 4th graders, there are 29 of us, 18 boys and 11 girls. There are 462 students in our elementary building, grades 1st-5th grade. There are four classes of every grade except fourth grade there are only three classes that. There is a separate building called the E.C.C. for the kindergartners. There are three other elementary buildings all about the same size as ours in the Zeeland Public School District. We have two middle schools and one high school, our school district is 94 square miles. We have a computer lab with 20 computers all hooked up to the inter net and 3 computers in our classroom also hooked up to the inter net. We also have art, music, physical education and library for one hour a week. In music we are getting ready for our Christmas program. In PE we do soccer, dance, gymnastics, roller skating and many other activities. Our school is trying to collect 1,000,000 pop tabs so we can see how a million looks we will then donate the tabs to the National Kidney Foundation and they will sell the tabs for recycled aluminum and use the money to help people with kidney disease. The schoolıs nick name is the Chix because when Zeeland was younger there were 40 chicken hatcheries in the city.
When we are not in school the boys are involved in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, church and hunting. The girls like to cheer, play soccer, basketball and swim. There are a lot of outdoor activities for us to do, near us, we are less than 10 miles from Lake Michigan which is the largest fresh water lake in the world. We also like to water and down hill ski, swim, hunt, fish, camp,and many outdoor activities. The Great Lakes have 1/4 of the worlds fresh water supply. The state of Michigan is made up of 2 peninsulas, the upper and lower peninsula. We live in the lower peninsula. The climate of Michigan changes a lot from season to season, in the summer the temperature sometimes reaches 100 and in the winter the wind chill can reach 40 below. In the winter we get a lot of snow because we live near the lake.
The name of our school is New Groningen Elementary, the name comes from the province in the Netherlands that many of the original settlers of Zeeland came from. Most settlers in the area came from the Netherlands and the towns are named for the areas they came from, Borculo, Vriesland, Drenth and Zutphin. The population of Zeeland is only 4764 people so most kids ride a bus to get here some of them ride for over an hour. Many of the students live on farms in the country in one of the small surrounding towns. Most parents work on one of the local industrial plants; Herman Miller, Howard Miller, Gentex, Bates, Prince and Bil Mar.
Our location is 86 degrees N longitude and 42 degrees West Latitude. Zeeland Michigan USA, if you canıt find Zeeland look for Holland, we are right to the East of them.
Sincerely ,
Mr. Van Kampen & Miss. Ritter