1st Tournament

Hayley, Miriam and Sharika before the trophy ceremony

Last Saturday was the Hayley's first UIL tournament.  Trevor had competed in these for the last 2 years and I have had a lot of fun coaching the 4th and 5th grade Oral Reading group over the last few years.  This year Hayley is involved in 3 different areas - Oral Reading, Music Memory & Impromptu Speaking.  Saturday Hayley competed in all 3 areas and did a great job!  Part of the fun is hanging out with your friends in between events.

4 of my Oral Reading Girls

They have also opened some events up to 1st graders, so Jake is joining in the fun with Impromptu Speaking and Solo Acting.  The principal is actually the coach this year for Impromptu Speaking and she stopped me in the hall the other day to talk about how much she is enjoying Jake and his "enthusiasm".  I think he has found a good niche for his creativity!  Only a couple kids from each school can enter each event and Solo Acting didn't get up and running in time for this first tournment, so Jake just came to the awards ceremony to cheer on  his school.  We came in a close 2nd place for the tournment, not bad for just a week or 2 of practices.  Looking forward to another great year of UIL!

District Champs!

Saturday Trevor and I spent all day at HISD's UIL Districtwide Tournament.  Hayley tagged along and hung out with us and her best friend who was there.  It was a long, fun day.  Trevor competed in 3 different events including a new area, Impromptu Speaking.  He had only been to 2 practices for this but the magnet coordinator said he was a natural and so good at talking about any subject she gave him... I believe that! 

Since he was in a speaking event, he dressed up nice and went with the bow tie for a little flair.  People kept commenting on his "tux" or "James Bond" look.  It was pretty funny.

The kids I coach in Oral Reading did great and came in 2nd and 3rd in the district. Trevor tied for 3rd place in Number Sense, an incredibly hard math-in-your head only test of 80 problems in 10 minutes. So this year Trevor medaled/trophied in 3 of his events during UIL competitions - Listening, Social Studies and Number Sense. All those areas included lots of practices, meeting before or afterschool each week. He learned a lot (I think) and more importantly, had a blast with his friends doing it all!

 

The kids all did a great job and our school came out winning the whole thing again for the 2nd year in a row - District Champs!

 

Random April Pictures

Just a couple other random events from April....

Michael is always on the run and is hard to get a picture of.  But thanks to me working with the youth program at church now, I get to see him in action a little more often (something I am sure he just loves sometimes!).  He was able to do a couple of really cool things in April, including having fun at a Hawaiian themed dance and visiting Merrill Lynch downtown one evening.  The view was amazing!

Michael and friends at a Hawaiian Luau Dance in Sugar Land



Checking out the view from the 74th floor of the Chase Building

Trevor had his 2nd UIL tournament for the year, this time at Davis High School.  Grammy and Grandaddy came back to her old high school stomping grounds and were able to go on a tour before the awards ceremony where Trevor medaled in Social Studies, one of the 3 events he was busy with that day.

Trevor with Grandaddy and Grammy at the UIL Awards

On a Friday a couple of weeks ago, the kids at the elementary school had a gigantic lemonade sale, hosted by the lower grades, to raise money to send to Japan for the relief effort from the recent natural disasters there.  Our school is a magnet for foreign language and cultures and Japanese is one of the four languages that the kids can learn, so it was important for the kids to get involved and help out one of our "sister" countries that they know so much about.  For about an hour, the kids had a fantastic time buying and tasting lots of different types of lemonade from the 8-10 booths of the different primary grades.  Music was blaring and the weather was perfect.  Who says you can't drink lemonade at 9 am?  The kids had a blast and the school raised over $1600 to give to the Red Cross for Japan.  Luke and I had fun checking it all out and tasting a couple unique varieties of lemonade.

 

 


With all these fun activities that are always going on, Luke has some big shoes to fill to keep up with everyone...and on this particular day, the shoes he found he liked the best were Don's!

Luke having fun in Don's shoes

UIL Tournament

On January 29th, Trevor & I went to the first UIL competition of the year.  Hayley tagged along to see what it was all about.  Trevor competed in 3 different events, Social Studies, Number Sense & Listening, despite being out sick with a high fever the previous 2 days.  He did awesome and medaled in his Listening Skills event...which proves he can hear me when I ask him to clean his room, right?!

Hayley & Trevor posing with his Listening Skills medal

I coach a group of 4th & 5th graders in the Oral Reading category & our guys did great, taking home 2nd, 3rd & 5th place in the finals. Our school ended up taking 3rd place for the whole tournament.  Of course, the best part of the day is hanging out in between competitions and playing games with each other!


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Getting pumped up to compete in Number Sense

 

Trevor & his friend Jonathan playing chess

Hayley playing Uno with a group of 5th graders