It all started with an idea from an eight-year-old Cochrane student and now the whole community is on board. 

Rider Degraw has been collecting pop tabs for a few weeks with the goal of buying a wheelchair for a child in need. 

As of Monday evening, the tally was at 104,413 pop tabs!

Michelle Kachur, Child Development Advisor, at Cochrane Christian Academy (CCA) said the donations of tabs have been unreal. 

"It's come from the community and people have parents going around picking them up at people's houses and literally coming in with garbage bags {full of tabs} and dropping them off. I certainly wasn't expecting that many, but it's been amazing."

Luckily she has help figuring out just how many tabs they have collected. 

"Between me and Rider and his little brother, they have been helping me weigh them and put them into big Ziploc bags. With the ones coming in from the community, we've had at least 30,000 or more tabs dropped off just by members of the community, so I've been dividing that up between the 15 classes."

Once all the tabs are collected, they will cash them in. CCA will issue a cheque for their value to the March of Dimes Assistant Devices Program and will then put the money towards a wheelchair for a child in need. 

The wheelchair could go to a child anywhere in Canada. 

The school-wide competition is on until February 13 but Kachur says they will continue to collect tabs until the end of June and she's excited to see how many they'll end up collecting.   

There's a box set up at the front of CCA for anyone who would like to donate tabs.