• Thomas Jefferson's own JROTC Armed and Unarmed drill teams competed at the JROTC Western Regional Championships held in San Antonio Texas on 4 Feb, after earning the invite last April after taking the State Championships.  The teams each competed in 4 events to achieve and overall score, in hopes of qualifying for the US-wide Army Nationals Championships held in Louisville, KY April 1st of this year.The Armed Drill team had a good showing and gained a lot of experience, competing in their first ever National-level Drill Meet.  At the end of the day the team came away from the meet placing as high as 8th in one event and 16th overall, one position higher than the only other Colorado school in attendance.  The team will now turn their focus to the upcoming Colorado meets in hopes of qualifying for next year's Regional Championships.The Unarmed Drill Team (HP) had an outstanding Meet, qualifying and competing in these Championships for a 3rd straight year.  The team took home a 2nd and 4th place trophy in two of the four events and finished up 7th overall (3rd overall in raw scores).  The team's efforts earned an invitation to the All-Army National Championships in Kentucky 1 April, however due to funding, etc the team will decline the invitation and focus on upcoming Colorado competitions in hopes of earning a trip back to Regionals next year.

Here's a photo of Coach Justine Sullivan and the TJ girls who qualified for the state swimming & diving championships held this past weekend. After great swims in the preliminary rounds, the girls 200 Freestyle Relay made up of  Megan George ,  Halie Hall ,  Morgan George and  Phoebe Briney qualified and made it back to the state finals Saturday afternoon. Diver  Molly Jordan Little also made the cut in prelims and was a finalist in diving. 

Hi TJ families!

Tons of great things coming up this winter/spring and we need tons of help to pull it off!  

If you would like to make a donation and PTO will purchase what is needed,  click here. 

Click here for the 2017 State Championship Rules.

Click here for more information!

11 Questions That Will Make Your Child Happier 

Some people are naturally happy/care-free, seemingly without having to make much effort to feel this way. Other people may struggle with this a bit more. The good old "Glass Half Full versus Glass Half Empty" debate. The good news is that there are some questions you can bring in to your routine at home that can increase happiness in your family members (and even yourself!). These 11 questions focus your children on how to make themselves happy. Eventually, your children will internalize these questions and ask them in their own heads. Then you'll have given them the gift of happiness, which will make you so (you guessed it) happy. 

1. What was your favorite part of today? This is a good question to ask at bedtime, to help your child feel content and happy before sleep. It also instills a habit of focusing on the best thing that happened in any given day rather than the worst. If you make this part of your bedtime routine, it will become second nature.  

2. What are you grateful for? This is a good question for the dinner table. Every family member can take a turn saying what he or she is grateful for that day. There is a strong correlation between happiness and gratitude, so this one is very powerful.  

3. What are you going to do about that? When a child comes to you with a problem, ask this question in a warm and curious tone. Don't just jump in and solve their problem; how does that help them in the long run? At least give them a chance to work it out on their own, and give them the gift of your confidence in them, which is evident by this question that implies that they can think of solutions to their own issues. If your child says "I don't know," you can say, "I am not sure either, let's try to figure it out together." Happy people are people who think of problems as surmountable, and think of themselves as effective problem solvers. 

4. How did that make you feel? At the risk of sounding shrink-y, an essential part of happiness is being able to notice and express your own emotions. If you can verbalize what you're feeling, you can make sense of it, you can process it, and you can obtain support from others. This is a great question to ask when your child comes to you with something "bad" that happened, instead of either dismissing it ("that wasn't that bad") or fixing it ("let mommy get you some ice!"). It trains your child to be aware of his feelings, and to use that information effectively.  

5. What do you think he/she feels? In any situation, you can cultivate empathy by asking your child to wonder about what someone else feels. Empathy will make your child a happier person; he or she will have stronger interpersonal relationships, feel better about himself for thinking of (and then, often, helping) others, and derive more meaning from life. 

 6. How can we look on the bright side? In any situation, you can teach your child that there are positives. With preteens or teenagers, this question may be way too corny, but little kids will like it. You can also teach them the expression "making lemonade out of a lemon" and ask them how you can make lemonade out of a bad situation. 

7. What part of that can we learn more about? In any TV show, book, trip outside the house, basically any situation at all, there is something to learn more about. And look at you, Super Parent, you already have your smartphone at the ready! So this time use it for teaching your child that life is full of learning opportunities. Happy people are people who are curious and always learning. So when you watch TV and someone says "Bonjour," you can look up pictures of France or a YouTube song sung in French. Let's use our ever progressing technology to keep learning conversations going between each other!  

8. What do you want to do on the weekend? Research shows that anticipation of positive experiences brings more happiness than the experiences themselves. Once your child is old enough to realize that tomorrow is not today, start instilling a habit of positive anticipation of small pleasures. A child who is excited all week to get frozen yogurt on the weekend is a happy child, just as an adult who plans a vacation six months in advance is happier during those six months.  

9. What can we do to help/to make someone happy? Bringing your child along to visit a sick relative, or someone recovering from surgery, or to volunteer at a soup kitchen is a wonderful gift that you can give to your child. Your child will feel even more proud of his behavior if he is the one to think up the nice thing that can be done (e.g., baking cookies to deliver, drawing a card). Research shows that giving even releases oxytocin and endorphins, so it's like a high that your child can become addicted to. Also, involve your child in your charitable activities, as giving charity is a form of altruism that is also linked directly to happiness (and just to being a good person, which you also want for your child). Incorporate a spirit of generosity into your child's daily life. 

 10. What do you want to do outside today? Getting outside and engaging in physical activities alongside your child is a wonderful way to get him or her in the habit of not just sitting around. Exercise releases endorphins and can be as effective as treating depression with medication. And the most powerful way that you can teach your child about exercise is to do it yourself. Children whose mothers exercise are more likely to exercise themselves. And sunlight can also help boost mood and regulate circadian rhythms, which means better sleep for your kids, which makes everyone happier.  

11. When do you feel happiest? If you direct your children's attention to the experiences that they most enjoy, they will start to realize that they can choose to proactively increase their time spent in activities that make them feel best about themselves. According to researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "flow" is the state where people find an activity so enjoyable and rewarding that they become completely immersed in it, losing all sense of time and feeling completely in the moment. If your child is lucky enough to have found an activity that makes him feel a sense of "flow," it is helpful for you to point this out and allow your child enough time to attain this state.