Entries from September 2008

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Book Fair

Our annual Book Fair was held last week. Once again, parent volunteers, library assistants and the hundreds of students and parents who visited the fair and bought books made this annual event a terrific success!
Library assistants stapled letters to book fair flyers, and delivered them to classrooms. They put up signs asking for parent volunteers, [...]

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Arctic Memories by Normee Ekoomiak

Born in 1948, Normee Ekoomiak lived in a snow house in the winter and in a tent made of animal skins during the summer months. With his family, he followed the animals, moving to the sea ice in the winter to hunt seal, to the river in the spring to fish for Arctic char, [...]

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

FernFolio Wordle

I recently learned about Wordle, which bills itself as a toy for generating “word clouds” from text. I created this from the words in FernFolio’s tag cloud. How lovely that the word students features so prominently!
FernFolio Editor

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

You’re a Bad Man, Mr. Gum! by Andy Stanton

Mr. Gum lives in a great old disaster of a house in the village of Lamonic Bibber.  A nasty, lazy old man with filthy habits, he hates housework, animals (other than insects) and most of the village people, except Billy William the Third, a butcher whose shop is as smelly and unpleasant as Mr. Gum’s [...]

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Chicken Boy by Frances O’Roark Dowell

For twelve year-old Tobin McCaully, seventh grade begins pretty much as every other grade, even though he’s now attending a middle school. He’s still saddled with the reputations of his hell-raising older brothers and sister, he’s still the butt of Cody Peters’ jokes, and he’s still trying to lay low enough to fly under [...]

Friday, September 5th, 2008

The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler

 

Twelve year-old Emily Windsnap lives with her mother aboard The King of the Sea, an old sailboat tied up in a marina in the seaside town of Brightport.  Because of her mother’s fear of water, Emily has never so much as had a bath, and she has never learned to swim. But swimming lessons [...]

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Woodenface by Gus Grinfell

The daughter of a Yorkshire weaver, Meg Lumb has learned to wash and dye and spin wool, and help her mother with her younger brother, but from her father she has also learned to carve wood. She creeps away to the churchyard during quiet moments to play with Dilly-Lal and Drum-a-Drum, two peg dolls [...]