For last year's Teacher Appreciation week, the PTO sponsored "This place would be a zoo without you." Each day I stuffed the teachers (and ALL STAFF, including custodians and cafeteria workers, don't forget crossing guards) mailboxes with little surprises. Surprises included inflatable zoo animal beach balls, zoo animal themed pencils and paper, a zoo animal shaped lollipop, a zoo animal shaped stree ball and "Animal" crackers.
Each day I also invited the teachers to participate in a challenge.
Day One: Walk the school and count all of the monkeys just hangin' around. I was able to get into school Sunday night, to hang decorations which included 32 paper monkeys from a bulletain board kit. Many teachers, even the 6th grade teachers, brought their students on the "hunt".
Day Two: Animal Trivia
Day Three: Create a crazy creature. Teachers were provided with animal shaped stickers, eyes, ears, mouths, etc and asked to create a crazy creature. I then hung these creatures inside the secretary's office on her window facing out so that all of the students and parents could see the creatures at dismissal.
Day Four: Racing Frogs. Teachers were provided with origami instructions on how to make a jumping frog. They were then encouraged to racing their frogs to see whose could get from one side of the table to the other the fastest.
Day Five: Who's gone wild? I asked three staff volunteers (A kindergarten teacher, the art teacher and the school psychologist) to wear animal tails for the day. The rest of the staff then had to find who had gone wild that week.
Teachers who participated were asked to e-mail their outcomes to me daily. For each activity they participated in they earned an entry into a drawing for a prize pack which included gift certificates and animal themed goodies to share with their class. The winning teacher was crowned Zoo Keeper of the Week and had her picture published in the school and local papers.
Throughout the week teachers also enjoyed various snacks, including a snake cake (I made it made from two bundt cakes cut in half and frosted green to form a snake), Zoo animal feed (trail mix) and Monkey cupcakes (I made simple chocolate cupcakes decorated with Vanilla wafers and Cheerios - 112 of them. YIKES)
Students were also encouraged to join in on the fun by creating a "Be Kind to Animal" Poster for our poster contest. One winner from each grade received a small goodies box of animal surprises, which included sunglasses, stickers, stuffed animals etc. Two winners, one from grades PreK-3 and one from grades 4-6 were randomly selected from all poster entries to receive the grand prize, which consisted of a Build-a-bear type zoo animal, lots of little animal goodies, and two age appropriate books- one on how to draw animals and another book that was an animal reference book.
On Friday afternoon, Mojo the Monkey (my husband dressed in a Monkey Mascot costume) visited each classroom and gave every student a plastic animal shaped bookmark.
I would have like to have held a "Save our Spots" fundraiser, asking students to collect loose change which would then would have been donated to the National Zoo in Washington DC on behalf of the staff. However, the Student Council just completed a similar change drive for the local food bank only two weeks before and I felt it would have been too much to ask of the families in our school who have so little.
This week was a ton of fun. The teachers and students loved it. I'm just not sure how I'll out do it for this coming year.
