Connect with the Troops

Thank you to all of the teachers and students from across the United States of America who, to date, have sent in thousands of hand-made scrapbook pages with special messages to the American men and women troops serving our country as part of the Connect with the Troops project! Your pages have helped us build the "World's Largest and Greatest Scrapbook - with heartfelt messages to our troops from the classrooms of America!" – Edition ONE!

New for 2007!

CONNECT WITH THE TROOPS – The World’s Largest and Greatest Scrapbook is continuing in 2007. Help us build a very special scrapbook for the troops serving our country.

This scrapbook is now in year two, and we have a new goal: to reach 120,000 pages so that we can reach every military person serving in theatre! Each page will be compiled into the book(s) based on the date of receipt to our office and scanned and placed in our digital collection, then sent in hard copy to the deployed troops!

Teachers and students – help us continue to build! Plus, you never know – we might just call and invite ourselves to your school. We’d love to visit and to recognize you for your patriotic effort in helping us build this scrapbook!

From the staff at Connect And Join:

Words cannot express fully the daily emotional impact that our office staff feels upon opening the packages filled with scrapbook pages featuring hand-drawn flags, eagles and thank you messages from children that include poems, short essays and simple sentences such as “Thank you for your sacrifices and protecting our freedoms!” Thus, this is one of the main reasons why we decided to keep building the scrapbook. Plus, if Sawyer, our new 5-year friend in Blakesburg, Iowa can continue to build Braille pages, then we will continue to build the World’s Largest and Greatest Scrapbook for the Troops!™

Students Making History

As part of the Connect with the Troops project, all of these pages are being scanned and digitized to be archived at The Library of Congress - Veteran's History Project. Except for one: A Braille page made by Sawyer Deever, a 5-year old kindergarten student from Blakeburg, Iowa!

This past holiday season, Linda Dennis, the “scrapbook lady” with Connect And Join, went on a road trip to recognize several students and classrooms!