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Oh, to work in a school where cake is allowed! Our healthy initiatives here in CT are making any type of food rewards a challenge. We have been calling it the "no cupcake rule" Students can no longer bring in birthday snacks unless it is something like cheese and crackers or a fruit or veggie platter. This is much more of an expense for families on a tight budget than a box of cakemix and a can of frosting. Judy Beahan, LMS Griswold Elementary School 303 Slater Avenue Griswold, CT 06351 jbeahan@griswold.k12.ct.us "At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better." Barack Obama >>> "Tony L. Pope" <Pope1966@AOL.COM> 3/2/2007 7:43 PM >>> 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please note: All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law. You can prevent most e-mail filters from deleting LM_NET postings by adding LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU to your e-mail address book. 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