Santa will be at Kump Education Center for a Centennial Celebration with a curious collection of 100 Christmas trees on Sunday, Dec. 21 from 1-3 p.m. at the 100-year-old brick house across from Kroger in Elkins.

The next Sunday on Dec. 28 everyone is welcome to visit without Mr. Claus, to again enjoy tea with holiday treats, watch a magical toy train, and make a silent auction bid on one of ten Christmas trees.

This event was inspired by two needs in our community. One is the need for a better landscape plan to help manage water at Kump Education Center owned by the City of Elkins, and the other is the need for better math learning opportunities for elementary school students.

For several years we have needed more trees in the Kump landscape plan. The old Kump farm was 11 acres stretching from Seneca Road to the railroad tracks.

Goddin Creek meandered through the middle of a pasture where horses and cows once grazed. It would have been a perfect place for a small model farm.

However, after the highway brought new businesses, Kump pasture land eroded with heavy rains hitting paved areas and draining off to develop a wetland pasture that may flood and threaten the historic house.

We have been planting small water-loving trees for several years, but most of our old evergreen trees have died. I wanted to plant 100 evergreens for our centennial Christmas celebration; however, the time and money were not available.

Nevertheless, we have an amazing collection of Christmas trees including some made of candy, ceramics, cloth, foil, glass, metal, paper, plastic, painted wood plus traditional pines and holly trees both in the house and outdoors. Some of these trees will be sold as silent auction items.

100 trees give us at least 100 ideas to help create word problems using percentages, fractions, multiplication, etc. The new insights into teaching math tell us that people who are good at math think of quantities rather than digits to analyze real world math problems. Since students have more trouble with “word problems,” we have made up questions for families to try at KEC:

If we have 75 Christmas trees inside the house, what percentage of 100 trees are inside?

What fraction of 100 trees are inside the house? What fraction of the trees are outside?

When the silent auction sells 10% of the 100 trees for $50 each, how much money will we earn to pay our tutors?

We hope our guests will support this event to help secure the future of Kump Education Center as a place where learning is fun.