“Take the Dare: Show You Care” Thank you letter from Tulakes

Tulakes Elementary students

“As the principal of Tulakes Elementary, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You have been a tremendous blessing, and words can hardly express what your generosity means to our staff and school.” – Principal Roland

“I am bubbling over with excitement and anticipation because of the generosity you have shown towards Tulakes Elementary. You all are a testament to the greatness of the human race.” – 2nd gr. teacher Kim Hooks

“We at Tulakes are truly overwhelmed with what you have done for our school. You are helping our reading goals become a reality, and the childrens’ love for reading will certainly continue to grow because of your generosity.” – 3rd gr. teacher Michele Parham

Thank You Letter from Tulakes Elementary

Dear contributors and supporters of “Take the Dare: Show You Care”,

Tulakes Elementary would like to extend a warm thank you for supporting our school. You have raised a great deal of money to benefit literacy instruction for our students. To say that we are thrilled with your generous contributions is an understatement. We are so completely overwhelmed by your generosity! We would also like to thank Cynthea for the hard work she put in on our behalf while promoting a new book! What Cynthea has done, along with the help of so many people from the children’s book community, will benefit our students for the rest of their lives.

Statistics show that 80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. Most of our students have an extremely, limited literacy background and get most of their reading time at school. It is our school-wide goal that at least 80% of our students will be reading on grade level. It has been a vision for our school to provide each classroom with leveled classroom libraries. We want to have leveled text available to students at all times. These leveled texts will be available to students during independent reading, learning centers, research time, writing time, reading instruction time, etc. We want our libraries to be supplied with more non-fiction, high interest books, and of course, the great books by all of you great authors.

Because of you, we will be able to accomplish just that. Also, we’ll be able to supply our teachers with additional resources to help strengthen our children’s reading and writing skills. For example our Pre-K can now purchase Handwriting Without Tears, a complete writing curriculum which contains reading and writing materials to get the children started with the process. Our kindergartners can have Take Home Reading Bags which contain a book and literature activities for parents to do at home with their child and return it back to school. In addition to leveled readers, our 1st-3rd Grades’ requests for things like book boxes, books with CDs for listening centers, classroom dictionaries, and Weekly Readers can now be met.

Words cannot express how thankful we are. Without your help, much of this would have never been purchased for our school Tulakes would like to thank you so much for your kindness and willingness to give.

With extreme gratitude,

Michele Parham on behalf of Tulakes Elementary
3rd Grade Teacher
Tulakes Elementary
6600 N. Galaxie
Oklahoma City, Ok 73132