Autumn Fun

Yesterday was fun. My husband and I have worked hard for months both at home and at school. He's a high school principal and I'm a junior high language arts teacher. At home we have completely renovated our backyard, something that took all summer to accomplish. There has been a fair amount of renovation at school also. T redesigned the staff work room layout, making it much more organized and effective for teachers. Plus it just looks good! New classes were added and others deleted from the school program. Slowly but surely he is making significant changes.

When we woke up Saturday morning, late, the sun was shining and the cool air beckoned us outside. It would have been so easy to work in the yard. I have 75 daffodil bulbs that need planting! But we resisted that temptation and headed downtown.

We haven't been in our downtown area for a few years. Sad but true. Parking has a lot to do with that. But since the weather was gorgeous, we parked and walked about ten blocks into the downtown area. We first hit a great toy store. We need to buy for additional people this Christmas since we are going to Israel to spend the holidays with our French kids and their families. I found dolls that I love for the little girls but the price exceeds the budget that we were given so I need to keep looking. Nuts! We had lunch at an old restaurant that my dad used to haunt. He needs to truly haunt it now (he died in 2002) because it isn't very good anymore. Then we walked around town, window shopping, looking for a bakery that would make the memory of our lunch disappear. We didn't find a bakery but we did find an antique store that had lots of books at good prices. I bought 22 books for $34. Not bad.

I've noticed something in my classroom. Each day my kids come in and read quietly for as long as I can permit. It depends on the day and the quantity of material that needs to be covered. I have added considerably to my classroom library to the point that the kids spend quite a long time scanning the shelves. I've noticed that the boys have gravitated to the non-fiction shelf. Yes, I only have one good-sized shelf of non-fiction books and several of them are biographies. I love biographies because they can inspire kids to persevere but my kids aren't really reading those books. Interspersed among the bios are several books on fishing, hunting, spiders, snakes, and cowboys. Yes, I do live in the west. Yesterday more than half the books I picked up were non-fiction books that my boys would enjoy. There are more cowboy books as well as books on sharks, inventions, and space. I also bought three Patrick McManus books. A little known fact about PMc is that he was once employed by the Daily O - our local newspaper. He is a great, humorous, short-story writer and the author of the first story my 7th graders read each year. They also base their first essay on this story. I can't wait to share these books with my students. My boys are going to fight over them!