Principal’s News

Reading and Math

As part of my job description, I have the honor of taking around the reading prizes that are awarded to students for bringing in their slips for daily reading at home. In this capacity, I have seen our students’ faces light up as they receive prizes such as pencils, bookmarks, slips to trade for ice cream bars at lunchtime, and $100.00 and $50.00 erasers (actually pictures of hundreds and fifties on the erasers). Additionally, students were able to earn “Fruit by the Foot” and money stickers. These awards have been great incentives for our students to read at home for fifteen minutes each evening. I’m impressed with the huge numbers of words and huge numbers of seconds that our students have read this month. Our final number of seconds read for the month is 6,239,900. The total number of words read is 8,052,121. I feel good that our students are spending that amount of time reading.
This month we had a math specialist from the state Math Helping Corps work with our teachers for a day on math standards and teaching strategies for math. She did an outstanding job of presenting math standards updates and spent time with each teacher, providing the latest teaching strategies and answering teachers’ questions about the teaching of math throughout the state of Washington.

Joe Worsham

Wal-Mart Kids Recycling Challenge

We are once again participating in the Wal-Mart Kids Recycling Challenge. Between now and March 31, 2009, we will be collecting clean, dry, plastic shopping bags from any store in any color except black. We will receive $5.00 for every 60-gallon bag we fill with these recycled bags, which we will use to help fund special events at school. Please help us help the environment. Send your clean dry plastic bags to school with your kids!