1. No Brownies at Bake Sales, but Doritos May Be O.K. raised my blood pressure way more than a whole plate of brownies (mmm… brownies):
Nine months after effectively banning most fund-raising food sales in city schools, a city panel will vote Wednesday on an amended regulation that will allow student groups to sell items [...]
Here’s a chance for you, my friends and readers, to tell my kids what to read: what book do you remember most fondly from your 6th-8th grade years? Get your suggestion to me by Thursday night and I’ll probably put it on my school’s middle school summer reading list! (I still want to [...]
Tags: School
We were delighted to host the charming Shannon Hale a couple of weeks ago! She signed great heaping piles of books while chatting with our kids, gave a fabulous presentation to a room full of rapt middle schoolers, and even handled their slight rowdiness (born only of enthusiasm, I assure you) like a teaching [...]
Tags: Libraries · Links · School
What I didn’t want to announce when I read the first Bartimaeus (because it was still in the works) was that I read it in preparation for a school visit from its author! He was here yesterday, signing loads of books and talking to my middle schoolers about the writing process.
He read [...]
Tags: School
Via my dear friend Eric at The Oyster’s Garter:
Who would win in a fight, Capt. Picard or Darth Vader?
I showed my 8th graders the tree octopus page today, by way of teaching website evaluation in a way that didn’t make them start snoring and drooling on their computers. “Why would anyone make a page [...]
Conversation between two of my 7th graders today:
S: I just finished a great book! The Incredible Adventure of…something or other. (I didn’t quite catch the name.)
A: Is it about mice?
S: No, it’s about a rabbit. Why’d you say that?
A: Because those adventure books always have rodents.
The kid’s not wrong!
(Image courtesy of I [...]
Tags: School
It’s September 11. I saw a headline on the front page of a newspaper this morning remarking on “Six Years Later.” And I realized: that means my 7th graders were 6 years old. Their awareness of the world around them has existed only in a post-9/11 world. They will remember 9/11 [...]
It only takes $5.60 and one week to get an envelope full of letters from students in a Boston suburb to students in a rural Ghanaian village.
The global infrastructure is an incredible thing.
Quick Ghana update:
Except for the last rabies shot, I am done with my vaccinations. I am impervious to disease! (How I wish that were actually true…) Yellow fever, rabies, MMR (measles mumps rubella), hepatitis A/B, polio, TDAP (typhoid diptheria pertussis), meningitis. I start my malaria pills in a couple of weeks [...]
I just checked out The Neverending Story for the first time in my career as a librarian. This is the book. It was the first adult book I read. Right after the movie came out I found it on my parents’ bookshelf. (Why did they even have it? It’s not [...]