Wednesday

Tea is a delightful afternoon beverage and one of the ways we wrap a week of hard work in Room 17. The fourth graders nearly filled one of my cupboards with all the tea boxes they've brought to school this year, and we may have to have more shelves installed if this keeps up! Did you know that tea comes in a peach flavor? Nice.
Parent/teacher conferences are next Monday and Tuesday and Veteran's Day is Wednesday. This Friday we will perform a song at the Vet's Day assembly and you are all welcome to attend. We might even save some tea! Now it's time to return to our lesson on common nouns.

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!

Friday

Walking into the classroom from lunch recess, I found the fourth graders singing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”. The next day it was “Whitehorse,” also by TW. Who says the record industry is in trouble? It's going to be an interesting year!

The kids are doing well and have started their Photostory projects. Several have recorded their voices to go with their self-portraits. We'll have a look at some of them next Thursday at Back to School Night. Hope to see you there.

Today's barbecue was the best we've had here at Franklin and the burgers were very tasty.

Tuesday

Tuesday in Room 17. Yes, that is a sentence fragment, but we'll work on that later this month along with run-on sentences and paragraphing.

The kids just started work on an exciting tech project that's new this year. To go along with their self-portraits (great job on these, by the way) they are writing a short biography. We'll make some digital photos of the portraits and then "put" them in the computer on a program named "Photostory." We hope to have some projects to show on "Back to School Night," which happens for fourth and fifth grade classes on Thursday, October 1st.

Today's bonus question: What are the nicknames for the five Pacific Salmon species?

Current Read Aloud: Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl. It's all about the harrowing and humorous experiences of a Fox family apparently at the mercy of three very mean farmers.

Recommended book for parents and other adults: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Dense but accessible crime drama set c. 1970.