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Sadly, I had to remove the post about our “Endpaper Artists” from the blog. I included some beautiful pictures drawn by our kindergarten class, but found that the pictures took too much of my blogspace. This made the blog log too slowly which was frustrating to us all. I’m debating about upgrading my blog to get more power. I’d like to say I’m sorry to the artists for removing their beautiful works of art.

This is the most absurd book I’ve read in a long time and I really enjoyed it. Bunnicula is a rabbit adopted into a family which already has a cat and a dog. The cat is convinced that the Bunnicula is a vampire. If you enjoy funny stories you might like to try this one.

Newton’s Apple was born 4 months ago when I got the idea to start a blog to enable us to have a conversation about the books we were reading. What started as an experiment has become a very rewarding and interesting project. In the past 4 months I have found I like the blog for these reasons:

- It was a way for me to have a conversation with you.

- It is a way to provide links for use in class, in school and at home.

- It is a place to showcase your work.

- It is a way for us to have an interactive experience and explore new technology.

- It is a way for you to give me feedback. Thanks for all the nice comments you have sent.

I’d like to know how you feel about the blog after using it for the past few months. What would you like to see on the blog? How would you like to use it? I welcome your thoughts.

Today is D.E.A.R., Drop Everything and Read, Day. I will be reading the classic book “The Secret Garden” today. What will you read?

The address of this blog will go home with report cards. I hope that families will sign on to our blog to add their comments, see what we are working on and link to some great sources of learning.

As some of you remember, creating a place for students to talk about the Massachusetts Childrens’ Book Awards was my original reason for starting this blog. Voting happened last week at both schools. Here are the results:

Newton School cast one vote each for Gifts from the Sea, The Anybodies, Midnight for Charlie Bone and Sliding into Home.

Green River students gave one vote each for Sahara Special, Leaping Beauty, Real Lucky Charm and the Tale of Desperaux. There were 2 votes for The Star of Kazan.

It will be interesting to see which book is chosen to receive the award. One thing the voting really shows is that we all have different opinions. Thank goodness there are many kinds of books to suit the many different people who read them.

What do you think?

A lovely student of mine has recently been reading books from the series “The Saddle Club.” I offered to look for a list of the books so that she could keep track of which books she has read and which she wants to check out. This is a system which has worked well for others reading “The Boxcar Children” or “The Baby-sitter’s Club” series.

While I didn’t come up with just the list I was looking for, (still working on that), I did find some really fun websites for fans of the books. I have added a categories of links on the right entitled Book Websites. It will be fun to add sites here. Please add your comments here about websites you would like to see included, books you hope have websites and any other thoughts you have about this. I hope you will enjoy this section.

The first in what I hope will be a series of Enola Holmes mysteries, The Missing Marquess is a book that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Enola Holmes is the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes and just as clever. If you liked the puzzles and codes in Chasing Vermeer and The Wright 3 you may also enjoy the clues in this book.

Was it by chance that Scholastic Book Club recently offered these books? At any rate, I’ve ordered a copy of The Wright 3 and The Missing Marquess for our library. I look forward to your opinions.

It is time to vote for our favorite books for the Massachusetts Childrens Book Awards. We will be casting our ballots next week, so give some thought to which book you will vote for. Feel free to post your ideas here.

I’ve been delighted to have so many blog posts. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Now that we are used to how the blog works, we can work on improving our posts. The ideas you are expressing are great. However, the spelling, grammar, punctuation and capitalization could use some help. Imperfect comments will still be accepted, but here are some tools to help you make your posts even better.

Use Microsoft Word to write your message. Any spelling errors will be noted by a red underline. By selecting “tools” and “spell check” you can improve the spelling on your posts. (You can also use a dictionary.) Green underlining shows grammatical mistakes. Sometimes fixing this can be as easy as making sure you have only one space between words.

While it is popular to use only lower case letters in emails and IM, please use correct capitalization. Be especially careful to capitalize the first word in a sentence, and proper names of people and places.

Once you have created your post in Word, copy the whole thing and paste it into the comment box of your post.

Good luck and I look forward to your posts.