This week we'll be reading and hearing stories for Halloween. Many are favorites that I return to almost every year (such as The Ghost of Nicholas Grebe, by Tony Johnston; and Porkenstein, by Kathryn Lasky), but I always find some that I haven't read aloud before and that are therefore likely to be new for the students. This year I will be trying out The Bone Man: A Native American Modoc Tale, retold by Laura Simms. This story relates nicely to 4th-grade's work on Native American people (and the illustrations are sufficiently creepy for Halloween!). A complete list of readalouds can be found on the Weekly Readalouds page of this site.

Thanks very much for the generous donations of food for the L.A. Regional Food Bank! I am so glad our school has been able to make a difference in this way. This is the last week of the drive.

I am pleased to say that the project that I've been working on in room 24 is now complete, so you should not find the library closed during the school day. I apologize to any patrons who have been inconvenienced.

See you at the Halloween parade!

Thank you to the many families who have donated to the library's food drive! The drive continues until Halloween day. All food collected will be donated to the L.A. Regional Food Bank.

In other library news, the library will be closed on and off in the coming couple of weeks so that I can process a large number of new books that the district has acquired to support leveled reading. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it will really help our students and teachers if they can get going with these books sooner rather than later.

Red Ribbon Week, a national event, starts this Wednesday, October 23, and continues until Halloween. The theme of Red Ribbon Week is "Love Yourself, Be Drug Free." Many families find this an opportune time to talk with their young people about living a substance-free life and in general about health and wellness.

The theme this week for class visits is exploration. All grades (except 5th) will be hearing books (some historical, some more fanciful) about heading off for new, undiscovered places. The 5th-graders continue with Clockwork, by Philip Pullman, a somewhat scary story for Halloween!

Our kindergarteners and 1st-graders will have a special treat this week: we will watch the video below, of Ernie singing "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon." Exploration is exciting and important, but there's no place like home.

World Food Day is Thursday, October 16. On this date in 1945, the United Nations created its Food and Agriculture Organization. World Food Day has been observed since 1979. This year’s theme is “Family Farming: Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth.” 

The United Nations estimates that over 805 million people live with chronic hunger--roughly one in nine people worldwide. Almost 5 million children die of malnutrition-related causes every year. Enough food is produced to adequately feed every person on the planet, but one-third of the food produced worldwide for human consumption is lost or wasted (all statistics from http://www.worldfooddayusa.org/what-is-wfd).

Although the majority of hungry people are in developing countries, hunger is a problem right here, too. As of 2013, “more children are at risk of going hungry in Los Angeles County than in any other county in [the United States]” (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/14/local/la-me-ln-county-children-at-risk-of-hunger-20130614).

From now until October 31, there will be a collection bin in the library for nonperishable food items that will be donated to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. The short video below ("Think You Know L.A.?") tells a little about the this organization. When you are dropping off or borrowing a book, why not bring a box of pasta or a bag of rice to donate? The more food we contribute, the more people we will help, so please generous.

If you or your children play online games, check out www.freerice.com. For each question answered correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated to World Food Programme. The game is best suited to older students (grades 4 and up).

Donating a can of soup or 10 grains of rice may seem like a small thing; but for most of us, we will need to work together to make a difference—few of us will ever have the resources to remedy a global problem on our own.

It so happens that Thursday is also a fundraising “Dragon Dinner” night at Veggie Grill (a favorite of mine). Mention Pennekamp and a portion of your bill will benefit our school. See you there!

First, a big announcement: books will no longer be stamped with the due date. I love tradition, but the benefits of this practice no longer outweigh the detriments, including cost of the due date labels, cost of two new date stamps (ours go up to 2014), inconvenience to patrons of not being able to read the back cover copy, mess and inconvenience to the volunteers (and me) of stamping the often tattered, heavily used labels. Each patron's household should be receiving an email every Friday stating what books are checked out and their due dates. In this age of "paperless" and digital, the time has come to replace our old practice with this clean, modern form of notice.

Most classes this week are hearing about the alphabet. Grade 4 is, with a reading of Sequoyah, by James Rumford. Sequoyah was the Cherokee man who created the Cherokee syllabary. Rumford's beautiful picture book biography is a nice followup to last week's discussion with grade 4 about the power of words. To see what all the grades are hearing please go to the Weekly Readalouds page of this website. Grade 1 is hearing The Numberlys, by William Joyce. (I will always have a soft spot in my heart for William Joyce: his A Day with Wilbur Robinson was the first book my husband and I bought as parents, to read with our own sons.) Grade 2 is hearing A Is for Musk Ox, by Erin Cabatingan. This book is on loan from the County of Los Angeles Public Library, from which I borrow a great many books each year for use during class library visits. I sure am looking forward to the reopening of our local branch, scheduled for April 2015.

Speaking of the public library, this Friday is the last day I will be accepting entries to the County of Los Angeles Public Library bookmark contest. Entries can be turned in at public library branches up 'til Saturday, October 11--the absolutely final deadline. 

Grade 3 is the only grade specifically focusing in library on Fire Prevention Week, which this year is October 5 to 11. We will be reading together The Firehouse Light, by Janet Nolan. Fire Prevention Week provides an opportunity to talk with your family about fire safety. If you would like to know more about the firehouse light bulb that burned for one hundred years, you can visit the bulb's website at www.centennialbulb.org, which features a webcam--or rather "Bulbcam," listed under the tab "Video." 

This week grade 5 really will take a look at the "Trusting Internet Sources" PowerPoint, which we didn't do last week, when we instead practiced searching for book report books and also learned how to review books online. Please remind your 5th-graders that the website "All About Explorers" should NOT be used as a resource for the upcoming explorer assignments.