Wow! Teacher Appreciation Week is Wonderful! Round Rock Leader coming to our classroom tomorrow!

Hi, Thank you for all the incredible surprises for Teacher Appreciation Week! I've received yummy Hershey's Kisses (and some real ones) from the kids, beautiful flowers, and amazing cards and notes. I am so honored to be a part of your child's life. Thank you so much. I also received another honor last Friday. The district had a banquet honoring all of the Teacher of the Year Honorees from each of the elementary, middle, and high schools. At the banquet, each principal went on the stage and told about the Teacher of the Year for his/her school. I was so excited to be there with Mrs. Lehnick, representing Forest Creek. Each of the teachers needed to write some essays about their teaching philosophy and the types of things that they do. Then a committee reads the essays and chooses a teacher to be the RRISD District Teacher of the Year. (one for Elementary and one for Secondary) I was so surprised and thrilled to be chosen as the Elementary Teacher of the Year at the District level. I will now write more essays and represent Round Rock ISD at the regional event. Thank you for all of your support this year. The Round Rock Leader will be coming tomorrow to interview me and take some photos of the children for the Saturday edition. They will be here after lunch. The children are going to be excited to be in the newspaper! Here's what we've been doing in class: We have two new friends! We have a tree frog (named Fred by the class) and a anole lizard (named Lizzie). The lizard was hiding yesterday but finally came out from under the water dish during inside recess and turned from brown to bright green right in front of the kids. It was so cool! We borrowed the pets from Living Science and they will be picked up next Friday. We will keep observing and learn more about them this week and next. Savanna brought in some adorable frogs and tadpoles last week. She caught them and helped us review the life cycle and complete metamorphosis! In the tank were tadpoles, tadpoles with two legs, tadpoles with four legs but still a tail, and little frogs. We were so excited to see the life cycle first hand and shared them with our first grade buddies. We began reading a book called, There's an Owl in the Shower today. We are using this book as a shared reading. I will read some chapters and we will write summaries and responses and discuss them. The children will also read some chapters for homework and write summaries and responses about them. This book will help us discuss some environmental issues and will lead us into disecting owl pellets next week and integrating science, math, writing, and reading. Writing about our pen pals is another activity that has been our focus. We will each write a page about our pen pal (essay, newspaper article, biography, poem, etc.. ) and decorate another page with some photos. These pages will be compiled into a pen pal book which we will send off to our RRISD printers and give to our pen pals. They will be coming to our school for their last visit of the school year on Wednesday, May 22. Come join us! In math we are practicing division and multiplication in problem solving situations and sharing strategies. We will continue reviewing all our math concepts for the rest of the year. We took a science benchmark today and overall the children did very well. We will be taking a social studies benchmark next week so we will be reviewing some more Texas history this week and next. Thanks again for all the wonderful notes and gifts for Teacher Appreciation Week. So you on Friday for the Totally O'Rama at 10:05! Sincerely, Pam Bartholomew