G’day, mate! Did you
know that there is a huge area of Australia called the Outback? The area is so big, and the families living
there live so far apart that going to school is impossible. Kids might live hundreds of miles from their
teachers and their school! The only way
kids in the Australian Outback can experience school is through “distance
learning” like you are doing this week.
Each child has a computer and an adult helper nearby, usually a parent,
and receives lessons and schoolwork from teachers and then returns the work to
teachers through email. Then 3 or 4
times a year the kids travel long distances to meet together for a week, kind
of like a school camp. Why don’t we
pretend we are living in the Australian Outback, and I will deliver your ‘library
time lesson’ for the week below? Isn’t
that a grouse idea? (In Australian slang
‘grouse’ means that you like something, like you think it’s a wonderful idea.)
I hope you have begun your Newbery Award or Newbery Honor book and are thoroughly enjoying it. Remember the book you chose was voted the BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR or a runner up to that honor in the year it was published. Reading just doesn’t get much better than that! If we were in the library this week, I would give you free silent time to begin your Newbery book and then give you the wordsearch puzzle below to do for fun and to see how many Newbery titles you remember hearing about last week. I hope you will remember many of those titles and will read them in middle school because you’ll find most of them on the middle school side of the library, too.
Before you start reading and wordsearching, I want to share
a few facts from those amazing Weird But True books that you love so much:
Vanilla
is used to make chocolate.
An
elephant’s tooth is the size of a brick.
The
Statue of Liberty’s nose is almost 5 feet long, taller than you.
Chewing
gum can make your heart beat faster.
The 50
tallest mountains in the world are all in Asia.
There
are around 3 trillion (3,000,000,000,000) trees on Earth. (I wonder how many are cherry blossom trees.)
Isn’t it just amazing and so much fun to see what all you
can learn when you read!
Now…on to your Newbery reading and wordsearch
puzzle. Check your school email and let the fun begin!
