September 3, 2014

Hello Parents!

Just a short note to let you know what we did today.

This afternoon, we began our read-aloud book, "Racso and the Rats of NIMH." We had read "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" at the end of last year, and the kids loved it. If your child is a 1st grader, you might consider taking Mrs. Frisby out of the library and reading it to your child to gain some more context for "Racso..."

In Racso and the Rats of NIMH,  A colony of super-intelligent rats have used their ingenuity to become very comfortable living with electricity, an elevator, air conditioning, and all the stolen grain they want under a rose bush in Farmer Fitzgibbon's back yard.  They decide, though, that they want to live with more integrity, so they abandon their comfortable life and travel to Thorn Valley where they will grow their own grain and they will do without electricity.

We talked about the hard work involved in farming and the fact that you need to have hope. You plant in the spring and you have to hope that you'll get a harvest.

Following read-aloud, we headed out to our classroom garden. I had planted potatoes (and a lot of hope!) in the spring when school was getting out. I put names of all my students on the potatoes. Today, we hit the garden, we found our name tags, and we dug up our potatoes! It was hard work, but it was fun.  Your child brought home a potato this afternoon that you are welcome to boil or bake or fry.  In class, here, we plan to wash our spuds and cut them up and make french fries for snack!  Yummmmm. If you have a great idea for seasoning french fries, send it in!
We'd love to use it.

Other things we did today: we went to Art, and we finished up our drawings/paintings about what we did over the summer. This picture will be the springboard for our writing our first writing piece of the year.

Note: 1) no home-school journals this week.

         2) Please remember to fill out your reading logs and send them in on Friday.

Thanks!

Mr. B.