Goats and Poetry!

Dear families,

Clubs started today. We did good in clubs and had a lot of fun.

This week we read a book called "Beatrice's Goat." A program helped this girl Beatrice's family in Uganda. The program is called Heifer International. The program gave Beatrice's family a goat! They gave her a goat because goat's milk is healthy, even healthier than cow's milk. Beatrice's family drank the milk and they sold the milk to get money. Beatrice got to go to school. Before that, she never went to school before but she always wished she could go. This is a true story, and we researched Beatrice on the computer and found pictures of her graduating from a college in the United States. She grew up to study how to help poor people who need help, just like she did.



Our class is thinking about how to raise money to buy a farm animal from Heifer International to give to a family who needs help. Stay tuned, we'll tell you our ideas later!

We're also starting to write poems for Writing Workshop.

This week some people wrote some silly poems, poems about people, poems with repeating parts and nonfiction poems. Here is a silly one Emily wrote:

Lazy

My name is Jazy.
I am always crazy.
I always cook
from a book.

But because I am so crazy

I always cook lazy.

by Emily

See you later, families!

The First Graders

Finishing our Drama Project

Dear families,

We had a farmer's market in our classroom! This was the celebration to finish our drama project. We had lots of good samples. We even had honey comb! We sold carrots, cucumbers, strawberries, honey, grapes, apples, peaches, cherries, cilantro, eggs, milk, cheese and bread that we made with flour ground from the wheat that we planted at Freedom Farm. We sold real food and pretend food. Most of the pretend food cost one dollar. The food was pretend and real.

And at the information table you could get maps, fake money to buy pretend food (for free), and reusable shopping bags.

Families came to visit our market, and Bradley and Robin too. Robin came to watch the movie with us that Kelli made.

We did a movie. It showed that one day a rabbit visited our garden and ate up all our carrots, just like the song we know "John the Rabbit." The movie showed all the other things we did on the farm for drama too. The kids giggled when they saw themselves in the movie. One thing that wasn't in the movie was that in drama we started a strike, like Cesar Chavez (he was real), so that farm workers got paid more money, were treated better and got more breaks and food.

Don't worry, if you didn't visit and see the movie we're going to make sure that all families get to watch it at home, either on the internet or on a DVD.

We all like Kelli and had a super time doing drama.

Bye bye, Kia and Rex and Feedom Farm!

Bye bye, families!

p.s. Cool.