The library will be closed on the morning of Monday, March 26, until 9:00 a.m. so that I can go to the meeting of the Manhattan Beach Rotary Club to thank them for once again including Pennekamp in the Rotary Reads program. On Wednesday, March 28, the library will not stay open as late in the day as usual as I'm going to watch a bit of Jefferson Elementary's "Battle of the Books," an event similar to our recent Super Literacy Quiz Bowl.

In recognition of the start of spring on March 20, this week classes are hearing books about bees and butterflies. The deaf and hard-of-hearing class will be learning all about Lalibela, in Ethiopia. Lalibela is home to remarkable stone churches and also renowned for its honey, which is harvested from basket-like hives that are suspended 60 feet up in trees. The Best Beekeeper of Lalibela, by Cristina Kessler, is a terrifically interesting picture book about Lalibela's bees and the persistence of a girl who wants to harvest and sell honey in the marketplace. She is told by the men and boys that this is not work for a girl, and indeed climbing the trees proves to be too hard for her; but rather than give up, she figures out through experimentation another way to gather honey, eventually becoming very successful. Pictured below are one of Lalibela's monolithic churches and one of the suspended hives.

To learn more about the honey harvest in Ethiopia's Harenna Forest, I recommend this travel article from the BBC.

The meeting of the 5th-grade book club will take place on Tuesday this week. Some students may have a time conflict on Monday--enough that it seemed wise to postpone by one day. We will be discussing Last Day on Mars, by Kevin Emerson, and choosing our book for April.

This week's theme for the readalouds and for books on display is science. For specific titles, click on over to the Weekly Readalouds page of this website. Below is a video of some pond creatures to accompany a beautiful new book in our library: Over and Under the Pond, by Kate Messner, to be heard by 1st grade.

We will have a special guest reader for one of our kindergarten classes this week: MBUSD Superintendent Dr. Mike Matthews is coming by to read On Meadowview Street, by Henry Cole. Welcome, Dr. Matthews!

Thursday night is a very, very special event: the 22nd annual Richstone Feast. This is hands-down my favorite annual PK event. The Richstone Family Center helps families in crisis to be safe, create stability for their children, and basically get back on their feet. There are two "feast" seatings, and the 5th-grade students handle all the set-up, serving, and clean-up. On top of the benefits to our community and to the participating students, this event is always just so much fun! Tickets can still be purchased from Mr. Warner in 3rd grade. I urge you--be a part of this outstanding community service tradition. It is Pennekamp, at its very best.

Pennekamp enjoyed having Rotary Readers in the library last week! These community-minded people read aloud to students in the younger grades, sharing both their love of reading and their dedication to community service. Thanks to the Manhattan Beach Rotary Club for this fun and important program.

This week is Open House, and yes, the library will be open! I hope many Dragon families have a chance to visit. On display in the library will be the students' paper cutout houses, individually decorated in a show of unfettered creativity. Everyone who visits the library at Open House can have a lovely bookmark to color and keep. I look forward also to showing off new books recently purchased through generous funding from the Pennekamp PTA. Other books on display will be on math and architecture, the themes for this week's readalouds.

To accompany the 5th-grade choice for this week (Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Masterpiece, by Marc Harshman and Anna Egan Smucker) here is a picture of the amazing house known as Falliingwater. Further below is a video of the Lego version being built. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Lego fan! My family and I have built the Lego Fallingwater, and many of the other architectural sets. There's so much to love about Lego, but the architecture sets in particular really help a person understand how and why these significant buildings work--aesthetically and structurally. (As always, be careful showing YouTube content to children--the accompanying ads, sidebars, and comments are often inappropriate for children.)

Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation

On Friday, March 9, the whole school is being treated to a popsicle party! This event celebrates the success of our food drive for the L.A. Regional Food Bank. Together our school donated an incredible 1,010 pounds of food to help people throughout the L.A. area who experience food insecurity. Boxes of popsicles will be brought to the classrooms at the end of the school day, and each student will be offered a popsicle, so please let your son or daughter know if for some reason you'd rather they not have one! There will be no ice cream sales that day. This celebration is generously provided by the Pennekamp PTA.

In library last week the students and I talked and thought about community. We decorated paper houses, heard readalouds about community, and went over our schoolwide voting results for the CYRM. 

This week, the community comes to us! "Rotary Readers" will read aloud during library time to students in kindergarten, grade 1, grade 2, and the deaf and hard-of-hearing class. The Rotary Club is a service organization whose members come from all walks of life, and promoting literacy is one of the club's many altruistic goals.

​Librarians from the Manhattan Beach Public Library will be visiting the four 3rd-grade classes during their library time. By arrangement between the County of Los Angeles Public Library system and MBUSD, all 3rd-grade students will receive a special "student" library card allowing them to check out three books from the public library and access the public library's impressive array of research databases.

Grade 4 will hear a picture book biography of Dorothea Lange, who is perhaps best know for her photographs of Americans struggling during the Great Depression. This selection is meant to enhance the 4th-grade project on Ansel Adams and is also in recognition of Women's History Month (which is March).

​Grade 5 will be introduced to the review function in our library catalog. Upon logging in, students can rate and review books, and their reviews (once I approve them) become part of the book's catalog entry, so anyone accessing our district's unified library catalog has the benefit of student input.