Wednesday

Our class just finished up the final draft of the first essay: My Favorite Dessert, and we will have some of them displayed on the bulletin board soon. They did pretty well for the first major writing project.

Please return the blue slips confirming the parent/teacher conference for next month. It's only about two weeks out, and I'm looking forward to talking with you.

If you'd like to give your child a little extra Reading/Writing practice, ask them to identify the compound sentences in the blog post. That's one of the things we've worked on in the last few days.

Tuesday

The weather is cooling down, the rain has arrived, but it's nice and warm in Room 17 here at Franklin School. Take a look at this short video of Tracy Blume's band performing a Disney song and teaching the intermediate classes about jazz. Very nice!

We'll work on keyboarding this week and finish up the first essay titled "My Favorite Dessert." It looks we have some fine writers in Room 17 again this year, and some of the students have started to write their own summaries of news items for current events.

Thursday

One of "my" parents remarked yesterday that today (Thursday) is the kids' "Friday." Well, that's true in a way since tomorrow is a "Learning Improvement Day" for teachers. We'll be at the high school attending a presentation on motivating all students. It's the second in a series that began days before the start of school this year.

The kids did a great job with Picture Day, and everyone is looking forward to the "results." Without a doubt it was the smoothest photo session in recent memory. And, thank goodness for my observant colleagues. Having left the collar buttons undone, there was nearly a fashion error on my part.

Students are brining in lots of news items for our current events program and all the parent help with these items is greatly appreciated. Practicing reading the articles before presenting them in class is helping our kids learn to read as well as understand some of the events going on in the world. Thanks for your involvement. Now if we could get some of those mushroom and spider pics....

Open House

Tonight's Open House for Franklin's fourth and fifth grades starts at 6:00 PM. We'll meet in the gym for a few minutes and then meet in Room 17. I hope to meet all of you tonight. There will be tea!