Marsha Goren

Dear "Our Hero" web site,

Our names are Segev Rom and Amit Waisel. We are 6th grade students from Petach Tikva, Israel. We wanted to contact you, because we wanted to show you how special a school can be, because of our teacher, even in hard times such as the times we are having now, here in Israel.

Marsha Goren has been our teacher since 4th grade. She is the reason our English is so good and we like to do many interesting things to improve it.

Our project is called Dream A Dream with Ein Ganim, the name of our school. In the project, we write so many children around the world by writing e-mails, sending packages, writing letters and corresponding in our forum and discussion board.

We traveled to Rome with one other classmate Orin about two months ago. Our school won the privilege to participate in the twinning project through the Global Junior Challenge organization of Rome, Italy. This project encourages global learning with other children. Our delegation, together with delegations from Nepal, Cameroon, Croatia, Argentina, USA and Uzbekistan (We write to Uzbekistan in Friends and Flags too – We'll explain that later) was each twinned to an Italian school in Rome.

Our twinned school is called Walt Disney School. The management and the children there are great. Together we won an award in the twinning project for having a great project and ideas on how to develop it, together with our excellent collaboration. This trip was also because of Marsha' efforts for global collaboration with schools around the world and to encourage the building of friendships among all involved.

We also received first prize on behalf of Mrs. Karen Eini – the coordinator of Friends and Flags. Her project is very interesting and we have been participants for two years. She is also from Israel. We represented our country with great honor and respect. In the F&F project, we write to many children, but also by using the project’s interactive site.

We also took part in a really BIG project with Intel Israel using the newly developed "Seeing Reason" tool. We researched the road accidents, a very interesting subject and necessary to know. They took pictures of us. We also were at their building, in the industry area of Petach – Tikva. One of the people there talked about Intel and we thanked them for doing everything for us.

During the last summer vacation (After 5th grade), two of my friends and I took part in a competition arranged by the eZedia company. We explained about Marsha’s projects and about a hobby we each liked. About two months at the beginning of school, it was announced that we won 1st place!!! We won an eZedia MX (The demo program we worked with, just in full version) for each of the children of our class (25), one for Marsha (1) and one for the eMac we won., overall 28 programs, one for eMac!!! We used the money to buy a new computer with Pentium 4 processor for the English room. Marsha met with us during the summer holidays and encouraged us to enter the contest because she wanted the school to win the computer and when we won she cried. She was so excited!

Marsha also won another two prizes from the P.E.F. Endowment Fund from the Ministry of Education in Israel. One was for the “Dream a Dream” project, which we already explained about, and the second for the “Rock & Roll” project. The amount of the two prizes was 1,200$! (Again the money was given to the school)!

Marsha also recently participated in a contest held by F&F for children. Anyone that participates needs to write why his teacher is special. Because many children wrote a beautiful reflection about her, she won the contest and the friends and flags coffee cup! We saw your contest and decided to write about Marsha because we think that also publishing Marsha and our “Dream a Dream” site on new places is very important.

It is our opinion that she is truly a hero. Her work is outstanding and it is because she loves children very much. Her investment and commitment to us is truly genuine and unique. This is why she is our hero. She truly deserves to be a hero on your site.

Sincerely,
Segev Rom and Amit Waisel
Ein Ganim Elementary School