Ooops!  Change of plan...I nixed Black Elk's Vision and substituted another biography to use with third grade and some of our bilingual fourth grade classes...The Hallelujah Flight by Phil Bildner, illustrated by John Holyfield, and I am sooo glad I did!  Great, great book.  The kids loved it, got into the story, enjoyed the illustrations and even joined me in reciting the repetitive phrases!  

Wow!  Where has the fall gone?  In some ways it seems like we just started the school year, and yet August seems long, long ago.  

Have been super frustrated about the number of interim principals we have seen come and go (and in some cases, come again) this fall.  We finally have a wonderful, shiny new AP, Eva Zapata, who is full of energy and enthusiasm and stamina.  But we need a fearless leader to come into Moye, to stay there and to work alongside Ms. Zapata and lead our campus forward and out of what feels like a dungeon.

Planning on making Stone Soup with second grade next week, and doing lessons on biographies using some great Bluebonnet nominees from this year's Master List with our third, fourth and fifth graders.  http://www.txla.org/TBA-nominees .  The books I plan on using are Black Elk's Vision, Louisa:  The Life of Louisa May Alcott, and The Extraordinary Mark Twain.  I am thinking we will make biography cubes with information about each person's life - Bio Cubes .