Dear Students (and families),
We begin the New Year after building together a strong, kind, and thoughtful community in our classroom. I appreciate all of your efforts, (often) bright and smiling faces, and regular consideration for others. I can't wait to begin anew and see how we even sharpen and soften our work and approach.
By this I mean that we have much to dig into and we need to be smart about that to be able to use our time well. At the same time, however, we need to be reflective - to look at how we do our work and learning - and to reaffirm these ideas of being kind, helpful, and open-minded as we do it. Sometimes this means we do things slowly on purpose to get it right.
My holiday was a nice and relaxing time. I had family in town and we enjoyed little Blake being his amazing self and we made a couple trips into the Seattle area, including a visit to Wunderkind Lego coffee shop and my first island trip visit to Bainbridge for a day. My mom made some favorite food from my childhood - Swedish Chili - and we ate lots (too many perhaps) of yummy cookies and desserts, including ridiculously good and pretty elegant Bundt Cakes (thanks, you-know-who). I drank lots of my favorite beverage - coffee at Starbucks (thanks for those cards). In fact all the gifts I received was basically overwhelming and I am humbled and grateful at you and your families' kindness. Cheers to you. I hope your holidays were equally fun, memorable, and spent with people close and dear to you.
I found a little time to consider our next read aloud now that we have shared Wonder together. That's a tough act to follow, but my colleague, Mr. Arthur, recommended Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli and this does sound to be a gripping, powerful, and meaningful book. It has a male protagonist and is fast-moving, with some deep themes running through it. It is a historical novel that brings us into the period of World War II and has as a major theme the maltreatment of Jews in Europe at the time of the Nazis. I also thought of a different wonderful book that involves a young female protagonist closer to home. It's called Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata. This will be an important addition to our study of American History. So we will be able to do our reading aloud, alternating between these two texts and using both like diving boards for rich conversations about books. Prepare to be amazed.
I so look forward to seeing each of you!
Welcome back,
Mr. Hagstrom
