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| Joanna talks about A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LaGuin. |
Starting next Monday, we'll begin our new book groups. Each group of four-to-five students will be reading one of five different books:
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| Not pictured: Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. (Our copies are on order...) |
Rachel Goldberg, our resident librarian, came in and gave inspiring book talks about each novel on Monday. We then asked each student to rank them in the order of greatest-to-least interest. We'll be announcing the groups soon, but everyone seems likely to get their first or second choice.
Each group will be led by an adult, who will be reading the novel along with the students and guiding discussions. Everyone seems very excited about it!
Our third week of school has been regularly punctuated by excited cries as caterpillars began pupating (ask your child), and later as butterflies emerged. With Lisa’s guidance, we’ve begun tagging our monarchs with tracking stickers, then releasing them back into the wild. If all goes well, we should be releasing several more in the next week or two. We also began reading a book together as a class called The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo. We’re doing a close read of this novel, taking time to think and talk about the craft of the writing and the intent of the author. We’ve also continued learning about the Yanomami tribe of South America, and got to have a lively conversation with an actual ethnographer who came to speak to the entire 5/6 about her work. In our writing journals, we explored the question, "What is the best way to talk to someone with different political beliefs?” It’s a question that I’m sure we’ll be coming back to regularly in the weeks leading up to Election Day. 
