Well, with a day at work beginning at 6:30am...I happily say that our Seuss
Celebration 2007 was a huge success. I look forward to an evening of peace and
quiet and not working on anything Seuss-related! Ha...
This morning we did a live broadcast from the lunchroom and did morning
announcements and showed our birthday cakes to the entire school. A local grocery
store made two large sheet chakes and we were able to feed all 330 students a
slice of cake about 1"x1"...and had about 30 pieces left over. One cake said
"Happy Birthday Dr. Suess" (yes...they spelled Seuss wrong) and the other said
"Happy Birthday Cat-n-Hat" (yes...they spelled it that way too). For our 80
plus staff members, one of our parents made us a three tiered birthday cake
with white icing and red trip and stars on top. We used Cat in the Hat
Christmas ornaments for toppers. Of course nothing can be perfect...shortly before
we
started to broadcast we discovered that this new system that had been
installed allowing us to broadcast live DID NOT work throughout the entire school.
One wing received no reception and several classes in the other wing didn't
either. I had to do some quick troubleshooting to see if the channels were
programmed in...only to find out that it's a problem with the new system. I at
least taped it and will show it over our closed-circuit Monday.
I had one parent volunteer (needed about 3-4 more) and my aide and myself
swapped out helping cut the first two cakes with the parent volunteer. Since we
had so much going on (as we do each year), we had to have classes start coming
in and getting their cake slices beginning around 9:15am. We cut the tiered
cake last and had staff come back for their pieces...which everyone enjoyed.
The parent did a fantastic job in making the cakes. I used fishing line to
try and cut the sheet cakes more quickly and more evenly...from previous
experience cutting with knives would pull of huge globs of icing. We finished
serving cakes (with some left over) and cleaned up just as kids were coming in for
lunch at 11am.
I ate lunch a little earlier at 11:30 am and then started getting our gym set
up for our afternoon event. This event included having several students from
a nearby private school who came and read "The Cat in the Hat" along with me.
I would read a page in English and they would alternate and read various
pages in their assigned language. They read in Italian, French, Latin, Spanish
and German. The kids clapped each time they read a page in their language.
I created a Powerpoint show that played as students and staff came in and it
showed pictures we took from Monday - Thursday. I also had another Powerpoint
that I used as we read "The Cat in the Hat." This program I had put icons on
the pages of the CITH that were read in different languages. When we got to
a page read in Italian I had a Pizza graphic show on the screen, French was an
Eiffel Towe, Latin was a bright green L, Spanish was a little boy in a
sombrero, and German was an Einstein cartoon graphic.
The reading-around-the-world segment took about 20 minutes. At 1:40 we did
our drawings for the winners of some Seuss books and Seuss stickers and a Seuss
pop-up book. Each time students and teachers got a question right in our
trivia contest this week they got to put their name in for the drawing.
FYI...our hardest trivia question for teachers required them to listen to me last
week
go through Karen DeFrank's slideshow or to come and look through all our
Seuss book. I e-mailed teacher/staff trivia questions for the day late during the
afternoon before. The last trivia question was on Thursday and I had asked
them: In what Dr. Seuss book can we find a character named John Raymond. It
drove them crazy! The answer is "Juevos Verdes Con Jamon" or "Green Eggs &
Ham" in Spanish. In my talk last week I pointed out the difference between the
English version and the Spanish version. To make the story rhyme in Spanish,
the character Sam-I-Am had his name changed to Juan Ramon...John Raymond! (At
least I hope that was John Ramond!!!).
Next we called all homeroom teachers forward (they didn't have a clue why and
had been driving us crazy all week to tell them why). Then I showed my last
slide and told them that every student in our school was getting a hardbound
copy of the 50th birthday edition of "The Cat in the Hat." Yes, we gave out
exactly 330 copies! If you haven't seen the 50th birthday edition they have a
metalic blue cover and there is a card inside that can be mailed in as a
birthday greeting for the CITH.
My aide and I had kept the A-V room locked up all week (another thing many
teachers noticed) and moved them up in the afternoon on a large A-V cart covered
with sheets. We had sorted the books on Thursday and placed in bags with the
name of the teacher and the number of books in the bag. We told them that an
anonymous benefactor had purchased the books. I had printed a label and
placed in each book telling what the book was for and the date and our school
name. The kids went wild and the teachers had a look of relief and
excitement...they had been afraid I was going to get them to DO something hard.
Teachers
gave out all the books to the students in the gym and then we had the kids hold
up their copy of TCITH and took pix. It looked awesome seeing hundreds of
kids holding up their copy of the CITH.
Our local newspaper was there and pix of the event will be in the "Young
Romans" section of the newspaper on Tuesday. This is a section of paper geared
toward school news. I hope they include at least one of all the kids holding
their books.
I don't think we will be able to top this...and don't know that I'll have the
energy next year...ha... At least I'll be two years away from retirement
before the Cat reaches his 60th birthday! Ha....
Tony Pope
Library Media Specialist
McHenry Primary School
100 McHenry Dr.
Rome, GA 30161
Pope1966@aol.com
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