principalâ€™s pad shauna rodriguez working together

CASITA PTA BOARD MEMBERS 2010-2011 SCHOOL YEAR [email protected] PRESIDENT Shauna Rodriguez 1ST VP, VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR Irma Melendez 2ND VP, MEMBERSHIP Maria Cornejo 3RD VP, HEALTH & SAFETY Alice Villalobos 5TH VP, WAYS & MEANS Cindy Foreman 6TH VP, HOSPITALITY Janine Gillot TREASURER Ramona Carvajal RECORDING SECRETARY Adele McIntosh AUDITOR Maggie Ahmadi BILINGUAL REPRESENTATIVE Manny Rodriguez SCHOOL PRINCIPAL Laura Smith TEACHER REPRESENTATIVE Charlene Manuto OPEN BOARD POSITIONS: EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT 4TH VP, LEGISLATION HISTORIAN PARLIAMENTARIAN View & print a FULL COLOR version of the newsletter at:

http://casitacenterfortechnology.weebly.com/

handbooknewsletters.html

Casita Center for Technology, Science and Math http://casitacenterfortechnology.weebly.com/

PTA Newsletter April 2011

Supervising the campus to make Casita an organized and safe school is not as easy as it looks. In addition to noon duties, each teacher is assigned a station ranging from traffic patrol to playground supervision. It is important for adults to set the example for children. We don’t want children crossing in the middle of the street or yelling at crossing guards or ignoring the direc-tions of teachers who are trying to get cars to pull forward so traffic is not blocking the street, the crosswalk or the bus lane. Nor do we want frus-trated staff hollering at parents and students to follow the directions. I realize there are not enough minutes in the day for all of our busy lives, but accidents happen when we are in a hurry. Plus, a child (and teacher) is better prepared for learning when the

morning routine is calm and free of conflicts. So, please think about how you get your child to and from school and realize that parents are an important part of the Casita community. It is with due respect that the Casita staff asks par-ents to follow the directions of the teachers and noon duties on supervision. Let’s work together to make Casita a safe and organized campus.

Principal’s Pad

Our very own first grade teacher, Sue Ritchie, has won the coveted Golden Apple teacher of the year award 2011. She was chosen from among the hundreds of teachers work-ing in Vista Unified’s 17 elementary schools. Mrs. Ritchie is a master teacher. It doesn’t matter if you are five or fifty-five. If you are a primary aged child, she will take into account your devel-opmental stage and ask you questions that make you think. It could be about letters and sounds or about numbers and what they represent. If you are 22 and an aspiring educator, she will show you how to effectively pose mathematical questions to K-8 stu-

dents and interpret the meaning of their answers so you can teach them number sense. Mrs. Ritchie started her teaching career in New Zealand. She has rep-resented VUSD as a Cal State San Marcos Distinguished teacher in Resi-dency and served in the capacity of a BTSA coordinator, kinder, first, third, fourth, fifth grade and Chapter One reading teacher. The magnet vision for the Casita Center has been sustained over the years by her role as a math lab specialist, technology leader, and collaborative team player. As for Mrs. Ritchie, she is greatly humbled by the award and believes that all the district teachers work as

Mrs. Ritchie is VUSD Teacher of the Year 2011!

Congratulations February Students of the Month! Kindergarten Julianne Cummings Luis Sanchez Jimenez Harrison Norwood Diana Hernandez First Grade Frank Garcia Vega Victor Mora

Mycah Gutierrez Jennifer Palmer Second Grade Jaiden Martinez Max Alaniz Karla Zavala Michelle Garcia- Crosswhite

Third Grade Francisco Amaya Ambar Ortega Fourth Grade Keilani Ramirez Laurie Caputi Long Truong Jaquelin Canales

Fifth Grade Kimia Shamsian Ashley Caudillo Raquel Hernandez Julyssa Orozco Luis Venancio

Working Together

hard as she does and deserve recog-nition, too. Thanks for every-thing that you do, Mrs. Ritchie!

Spirit Shop Adult ($14.00) and Children's ($12.00) t-shirts are in stock and available for pur-chase along with our Casita discount cards ($10.00), water bot-tles ($3.00) and smencils ($1.00). Order forms are in the office. Your order will be processed in a timely manner and given to your child's teacher.

Book Fair Recap

Thank you to all the parents that helped with the book fair. Your dedication to our school and our students helped make the book fair a success. PTA do-nated over $1500 to give Book Bucks to each student so that they could use them to buy a book. With the profits from the book fair, our library and our A.R. program will be receiving funds to-wards the purchase of more books. Thanks to your generous donations, we also raised over $200 in honor of the Judy Kay Robinson’s Book Nook to pur-chase additional books in her honor.

T-Shirt Front

This month we’ll meet fifth grade teacher, Ms. Lee. She was destined to become a teacher because ever since she was a little girl, Ms. Lee has wanted to be a teacher. Lucky for us, she chose to work at Casita. Hyun Lee was born in South Korea and lived there until she was 12 years old, at which time she moved to the U.S. Her favor-ite food is kimchee, a Korean spe-cialty that is made from fermented napa cabbage in a spicy red sea-soning.

Ms. Lee loves to spend her free time hiking and reading. She even has some favorite young-adult books to recommend. Her favorite author in that genre is Robin McKinley. She wrote “The Hero and the Crown”, a Newbury win-ner, and “The Blue Sword”. A favorite memory that Ms. Lee has from elementary school is from a sixth grade overnight field trip. She had a lot of fun learning about new things and participating in fun activities. Sadly, Ms. Lee has no pets and has not had any for 8 long years. She does miss having ani-mals and is very partial to dogs and cats. If you can’t find Ms. Lee at Ca-sita, don’t bother looking for her on the roof. Or in a tall tree. Or at the top of a ladder. She is afraid of heights and her knees will start

Treasured Teacher: Ms. Lee


PTA Newsletter— April 2011

to shake if she is too high off of the ground. When you do find Ms. Lee, say “Ahn-young-ha-seh-yo” or “Hello”. Be-sides Korean and Eng-lish, she also speaks Mongolian, Japanese, and a bit of Spanish.

CSI Las Vegas....CSI Miami....and now, announcing CSI CASITA! 2nd-5th grade students will soon be engaged in a two-week long Mystery Festival, in which stu-dents act as crime lab scientists to help solve a make-believe mys-tery. In an effort to discover who borrowed a stuffed animal called "Mr. Bear," 2nd and 3rd grade students will examine clues and do tests on evidence, while learn-ing important science skills and concepts. 4th and 5th grade stu-dents will also be trying on their detective hats as they attempt to

unveil which fictional suspect (or suspects!) may have committed a "crime" at Felix's beach house. Because these mysteries (like all mysteries) are layered in complex-ity, be prepared to hear your child change his/her mind many times throughout the festival, as he/she uses a multitude of critical thinking skills to see through the superfi-cial, misleading evidence and come up with more complicated solutions, even involving conspira-cies, deceptions, and other con-niving schemes.

Because our campus will be trans-formed into a forensic laboratory, we are in desperate need of par-ent volunteers who can help stu-dents perform tests on various clues found at the scene of the crime. Tests include thread com-parisons, chromatography, pH tests, power tests, and more! If you are interested in helping with the Mystery Festival, please email Ms. Phillips at: [email protected] More infor-mation will also be sent home after Spring Break.

Coming this May, the Mystery Festival!

Jog-A-Thon Thank you to our mili-tary personnel that took time out of their very busy schedules to come and support our children and encourage them to run. Congratulations to Ms. Seabrook and her kin-dergarten class! Her class had the most do-nations and had 80% class participation. They will be receiving an ice cream party.

Thanks to Melanie Dun-can and Melody Beauchamp for their generous donations of oranges for our children and to the many parents that helped with handing out the refreshments and tallying laps.

Leftover Easter Egg Recipe The fun of Easter has come and gone, and now you are left with lots of hard boiled eggs. What to do with them? Eat them, of course! Here is a simple recipe for Egg Salad that will use up lots of hard boiled eggs.

Ingredients: 8 hard boiled eggs 1/2 cup Mayonnaise 1 tsp. yellow Mustard 1/4 cup chopped green onion Salt and pepper to taste 1/4 teaspoon paprika

Directions: Peel and chop the hard boiled eggs. Place the chopped eggs in a bowl, and stir in the may-onnaise, mustard and green onion. Season with salt, pepper and paprika. Stir and serve on your favorite bread or crackers.

Let’s Help Lucas!



We want to thank all the Casita families and staff for their generous donations for Lucas Valencia's, heart transplant. He’s a former Casita student with a heart defect called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy that causes cardiac arrest, usually in the teen years. Our next fundraiser will be a "coin collecting contest". The classroom that collects the most money for Lucas by the end of April will win a pizza party and one lucky stu-dent will get to be "principal for a day!". Special thanks to Susan Eubanks for donating pizzas! To make a donation online or find out more about Lu-cas go to: http://www.facebook.com/l/73d986utp8BG9tdUkI_ZnaXzaeA/COTAforLucasV.com

Your teachers have chosen their bas-ket themes and are in need of your do-nations to fill these baskets. If you are not sure what your classroom basket is, please ask your teacher. Items for the baskets will need to be turned into your teachers no later than April 15th so that we have time to process them for the Open House raffle. PTA is in need of baskets. If you have any medium or large baskets you would like to donate please bring them to the office by April 15th.

Lucas Valencia and his brother at the Book Fair

Basket Raffle 2011

President Shauna Rodriguez

Vice President Cindy Foreman

Volunteer Coord. Irma Melendez

Membership Ramona Carvajal Treasurer Lisa Deju Health/Safety Amy McGuire

Legislation Cecilia Ramos

Ways & Means Gladys Mueller

Hospitality Melanie Duncan

Secretary Janine Gillot Auditor Maggie Ahmadi Bilingual Rep. Gaby LaChance Nominations are needed for: Historian Parliamentarian

At the next PTA unit meeting, members will get to vote for or against nominees for next years’ PTA board. The date of the next meeting has yet to be determined. If you’d like to be a nominee for next year’s board, contact: [email protected]

Vote at the Next PTA Unit Meeting

New Blacktop Solar System



Calendar Dates

April 11 Return from Spring Break April 11 SSC Meeting 3:00 April 12 PTA Board Meeting 5:30 April 15 Yogurt Giant after school April 22 Earth Day April 26 Bus driver Appreciation Day April 27-May 10 Star Testing April 29 Yogurt Giant after school

Have you noticed the new addition to our playground blacktop? Thanks to parent volunteers and STEM Acad-emy students, Casita has a model of the solar system running along the track. It starts with a tether ball court that is painted yellow to represent the sun and stretches to Neptune , 450’ away, near the second grade classrooms. If you haven’t heard the news, Pluto is no longer classified as a planet and

has been left out of this model. Because the distance we have to work with is only 450’ long, the celes-tial bodies have been magnified by 100x to make them more visible. So we show the sun to be 14’ across, but it would actually be 1.4” in diameter. Jupiter, the largest planet, is painted at 17” across, but it would actually be .17” or 1/6”! And Earth is painted as 1.5”, but would actually be 1/64”, much too small to paint.

April is Organ Donor Awareness We’ve been hearing a lot about heart transplants lately because Casita’s former stu-dent, Lucas Valencia, is in need of one. Many people in this country are in the same situation as Lucas, trying to raise money for a transplant and thousands are stuck wait-ing on long lists for an organ that they need.

The need for organ and tissue donations is tremendous. Ac-cording to the Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 63 Americans receive an organ transplant every day. More than 110,460 people in

desperate need of life-saving assistance are on the national transplant waiting list. Tragi-cally, each day about 18 peo-ple will die because the organs they need are not available in time.

Organ donation can literally restore sight to the blind. It can offer a second chance when a weak heart begins to fail. Your bone marrow might be the miracle match for a child stricken with leukemia.

To register as a future organ donor, follow this link: http://www.organdonor.gov/how.asp

principalâ€™s pad shauna rodriguez working together

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