Each teacher has a homeroom mother whom I will contact to help get volunteers for the pot luck lunch, soups and sweets. The other activities will be sent home on a flyer probably two weeks before with reminders sent home the week before.
What have you found the easiest way to notify your parents of the week's events/themes? Do you just send home a flier? We don't put out a PTA newsletter (that will hopefully change next school year if I'm elected Pres) so sending home fliers is our only way. So, all of the week's events won't be a surprise. How early do you notify the kids and parents of what is planned?
last year I had my kids' classes write Why our Teacher is Special and then i laminated and bound it. They loved it! This year I just became a Mary Kay rep, so I'm going to have an afternoon of pampering courtesy of Mary Kay.
Closetwriter, we have parents cook for the teachers often--everything from dinners on parent conference nights to baked goods for teacher work days. I have a list of volunteer cooks from the beginning of the year; it's a category on our volunteer sign-up sheet, just like "help with fun fair" or "shelve books in the library," and a lot of our faithful volunteers sign up for cooking in addition to other things.
I compile a menu of what I want to serve and how much of each item I'll need--so many Crock-pots of soup, so many desserts, etc.--and circulate that menu to my volunteer pool via email. I usually get enough responses that all I have to do is tweak a little where I get too many volunteers for the same thing. If I don't get enough responses that way, I start hitting up people by telephone.
I don't really know why we have such good luck with this, but it may help that I don't ever ask for large quantities from one person, and I try to give lots of thanks to the donors. Our teachers are also enormously appreciative!
Here's the poem I wrote. I have a few more too from a parent's point of view. If I have time I'll post those too.
Teaching Children
The minute I took this job I knew it wouldn’t last,
Because I saw the faces of the kids from a fright fest.
So I started to get going, I started to set the pace
I gave them all a lesson in kindness to the human race.
I set the rules, I set the law that was within this room,
I told them so if they did not follow, what would become their doom.
They listened close at least it seemed to my instructions giv’n
It seemed to me it had sunk in and I was the one winning.
But the days went by like flashes of light, it went so fast for me,
These ones before me were learning fast is what I was about to see.
ABC’s and 123’s were all being done with ease.
Triangles, Squares, play doh, and colors even planting daisies.
I realized one cool spring day as I sat outside to watch,
These children play and run and jump and even play hopscotch.
That they applied their skills and talents that I had helped to teach,
All those lessons all that time and the times I gave a speech.
I looked within to see the teacher, the person I wanted to become,
Was merely a person with a human spirit with a love for this and that one.
That the subjects I taught and the lessons prepared
Wasn’t a tactic but was all because I cared.
About these little ones, about their lives and who they would someday be
That it’s more than just the plan of the day and the structure that we’d see.
I learned from them and from within myself as well
That it’s not the subject or the lesson plan until that final bell.
That it was merely a talent I finally set to strengthen
I wasn’t teaching subjects, I was teaching children.
We had our teacher luncheon catered last year for the first(and Last) time. They showed up an hour late and most of the teachers missed lunch time and had to come back between classes to eat--they were very forgiving--it wasn't our fault the caters brought the food an hour late---MAKE SURE THE CATERS KNOW WHAT TIME TO BE THERE AND ARE THERE LOL! This year we are going back to making the food ourselves and having parents send in food too.
