Sunday, September 23, 2007

Seen and Heard This Week

In addition to my regular work week adventures, I attended a summit on civics education at the Capitol building in Richmond and an advisory board meeting for VA's Agriculture in the Classroom program. During the course of the week I saw and heard many interesting things. Here are a few of them.

Dr. Michael Cornfield spoke at the Civics Summit on New Media, New Citizenship and American Politics. He likened the presidential race this year to The Amazing Race, largely because of the diversity of candidates, and a treadmill dance, because so many underlying factors are keeping candidates in motion. To help you understand this phenomenon, take a look at the video Dr. Cornfield shared.



I ran across this short line in an article I read:
For busy teachers (is that a tautology?) . . .
My response? Absolutely.

William was chosen as last week's Star of the Week. As part of the honor he got to bring books from home for read aloud. His choice for Friday was one of our favorites, A Day in the Life of Murphy. If you haven't heard it discussed and read aloud by Daniel Pinkwater and Scott Simon, you're missing out. We listened to it Thursday night just before bedtime. (This was part of effort to settle down after the 6 chocolate bar dessert!)

At the end of the week, William came home with a book where each classmate had written and illustrated a page about him. While I was shocked by the number of times handsome or cute came up, I was thrilled to read words like nice and kind. I was also happy to read the number of entries that said William "shares great books." AMEN to that.

As we read Big Chickens and Zinnia and Dot again (and again) this week, my mind turned to thoughts of Susan at Chicken Spaghetti. Yesterday when we went to Maymont, William suggested I take a picture for the "chicken lady." So, this one's for you, Susan!
Finally, one of the best sights this week also came during our Saturday morning wanderings at Maymont. We watched the river otters play, the foxes sleep, climbed rocks, explored the gardens and fed the animals. In the end though, we were absolutely entranced by the black bears.
That's it for this week's sights and sounds. I hope your week ahead is a good one.

2 comments:

  1. Tricia, you've made my day. I love the chicken photo and especially being known as the Chicken Lady!

    Today Jr. suggested that we read "Wings" aloud to our chickens. (Our library has a Reading to Rover program in which the kids read to therapy dogs.) So we did. They stretched out and took a dust bath and looked a little nonchalant at their first read-aloud.

    Yay for William's star week.

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  2. William has a great teacher, I think : ) Thank you for the bears and chickens. What amazing pics!

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