Dan Dahl and Stephanie Pirsig, AmeriCorps members working at Southwest Middle School, attended the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota&8217;s annual conference on Oct. 22 at the U of M Continuing Education Center in St. Paul.

The emphasis of the conference was working effectively with volunteers of different generations. The two attended seminars on working with immigrant youths, connecting with families, engaging the baby-boomer generation and recruiting male mentors.

The AmeriCorps Team is always looking for positive adult role models to volunteer for the in-school mentoring program at Southwest. All it takes is one hour a week. For more information, call 379-5314.

Sibley students&8217; artwork showcased on Web site

In an effort to showcase and make available Sibley students&8217; artwork, there is a link to a Web site that will allow people to view and order prints and other merchandise.

Mark Blong, art teacher, has worked at taking digital pictures of children&8217;s work and assembling them into &8220;galleries&8221; by grade on this Web site, www.sibleyschoolart.smugmug.com. This site can be shared with friends and relatives.

This is a work in progress and it is the hope to have a piece for everyone there. It does take time, but artwork needs to be shared and showcased and that is the goal.

At this time, all prices are set by the host site, Smugmug, and that includes shipping. There is no cost to Sibley. Smugmug hosts the pictures. It makes its money by people purchasing prints or other merchandise. There is no pressure to buy.

If people have problems with ordering, they are asked to remember that Sibley and District 241 are not customer service representatives. All issues would need to be resolved with Smugmug directly.

People will also find absolutely no pictures of students or their names tied to their pictures. This does become part of the World Wide Web. The only thing you will find is the artwork with the first name and last name initial, so you can locate the artwork you want.

In some cases, students will sign their artwork like all good artists do. In those cases, you might see a full name.

Area Learning Center students create coloring book

As a service learning project, a group of students at the Area Learning Center worked on a project together that involved organizing, designing and compiling pages of a coloring/activity book that they delivered to Early Childhood Special Education students on Halloween.