As some of you probably already know, the winner of Sunday’s New York Marathon was Mebrahtom Keflezighi who immigrated to America from Eritrea (in East Africa) when he was twelve years old.  While many are celebrating the first American to win the race in a very long time, others are saying Meb was not a real American because he was not born here. What do you think?  Must you be born in the United States to be an American?

Today you are going to begin your very first literature unit in fourth grade, a study of the children’s books of E. B. White.  You can read an overview of the assignment here.   To begin I will be giving each of you a copy of Charlotte’s Web to read and, eventually, to annotate. “What is annotating?”  you ask.  Well, you will find out soon enough!  Trust me, it is fun!

Together we will plan out how you will read the book.  Most of it will be at home (part of your nightly 30 minutes of reading), but some might be during Lab in school. Some of you may read it very quickly and some of you may want to take your time with it.  Both ways are just fine!  Together we will decide when everyone should be done.  And then we will begin the annotating!

If you want to learn more about E. B. White you can go to these two sites:

E. B. White — Most Companionable of Writers

The New York Times: Life and Times of E. B. White

I’m thinking about you and am looking forward to meeting you a week from today.  Yesterday I was walking my dog, Lucy, and ran into one of you! She remembered me because she was in our third grade buddy house last year.  Others of you were too, some of you have brothers and sisters I taught, and some of you are going to be new to me.  I can’t wait for our first day so we can get started on our year together.

I was in school last week and the room is starting to get into shape.  There are books, books, dictionaries, pencils, ladybugs, planbooks and more all waiting for you.  I’m especially eager to see you put your individual stamp on it — your art, your writing, and just your own sense of things.  Some of Edinger House looks the same every year (loads of books, the fabric on the walls, the ladybugs), but it always looks different too because there are different students in it every year.  Can’t wait to see what you do to make it a special place this year!

Next Monday you will come to school a little later than usual and we will dive in! At the end of the day, a little earlier than usual, your parents can come to the classroom to see it (and you can show them around) to pick you up.  Then on Tuesday, you will start and end your school day the same as everyone else.

See you soon!

• Blogging
• Being scared the first time I came to the 9th floor
• Writing my first blog post
• The Alice Comics
• Amistad Poems
• Elizabeth Alexander’s visit to our school (shortly after she read her poem at President Obama’s inauguration)
• Ellis Island Simulation
• Our field trip to a farm on the second-to-last day of school, where we held baby chicks and saw a brand new calf
• The Do You Know Books contest
• Wizard of Oz Debate
• Writing in our journals
• The Alice Tea Party
• Writing our Cindy stories
• The Graveyard Book! We read the book, created a mural, influenced (we hope!) it winning the Newbery Award. 
• When You Reach Me!  We hope this wins the Newbery next year
• Reading aloud from Cosmic
• The Underneath
• Reading brand new (and sometimes not even released) books from Ms. Edinger, for example The Seems
• Ladybugs
• Blogging for Writing Skills
• Margru
• Weekly emails to Ms. Edinger (elephant)
• Our Halloween Party! Our room was transformed into a spooky haunted house.
• 1900 House
• Colonial House
• Charlie Chaplin and Marx Brothers movies during lunch

1. Make a list of ten “scenes” (events) for your comic chapter. (If you have two chapters, you can have up to twenty scenes.)
2. Write the text to go with these scenes. You can use text from the actual book (here it is online) or rewrite it. Up to you.
3. Do the art for your scenes. You may want to make backgrounds for each scene separately from the characters. You also may want to reuse some of these for the different scenes.
4. Scan in all the art.
5. Do a story board.
6. When you have everything ready you will create a comic using Comic Life.
7. And lastly we will combine them in a series of pages for our class blog!

Similarities between a regular novel and a graphic novel:

• Both tell a (fictional or non-fictional) story
• Both have characters (like actors in a movie)
• Both have a plot and a setting
• Most of the time, they both have words
• Both have creators

Differences:

• Graphic novels use pictures!
• Graphic novels use captions to describe what is happening (settings, background information, or to help express the passage of time).
• They also use speech bubbles when characters are speaking to one another.
• Thought bubbles communicate characters’ ideas.
• Sometimes, speech bubbles are drawn in a way to represent emotions, like surprise, anger, excitement.  Sometimes different kinds of speech bubbles are always used with the same characters to represent their personalities. The size, shape, and design of bubbles help to communicate emotions and traits.
• You can show sound effects with images (and words) in a graphic novel.
• Different colors can also convey emotion.
• Pictures and words are enclosed into panels, which may take many forms and sizes. The space between the panels is called the gutter.
• We looked at several examples of how graphic novels mark the passage of time and motion.
• We also examined how to represent the five senses and emotion.

Your blogs might go public soon, so be sure to proofread carefully (checking for punctuation, sense, capitals, and spelling). Make sure that you have a good topic sentence, some supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence, too.

Since your blogs might be public soon, please include a link to The Dalton School so your readers can learn more about where you saw the play.

To help you remember, here is a list of characters:

• Oliver
• Mr. Bumble
• Widow Corney
• Noah Claypole
• Mr. & Mrs. Sowerberry
• Charlotte
• Artful Dodger
• Fagin
• Nancy
• Bet
• Charlie Bates
• Bill Sykes
• Mrs. Bedwin
• Mr. Brownlow
• Dr. Grimwig
• Old Sally
• Old Lady
• Rose Seller
• Milkmaids
• Strawberry Seller
• Knife Grinder
• Chairman
• Dickie

Today I told you about Olaudah Equiano who was around ten years old when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. After many years and experiences (good, bad, and horrible), he was able to buy his freedom and eventually wrote his autobiography to let others know about the horrors of slavery. I then began reading aloud  The Kidnapped Prince, an adaptation of Olaudah’s autobiography for children by Ann Cameron.

As I mentioned to you, there has been some debate as to whether or not Olaudah was born in Africa or not.  Check out this link for some reasons this could or could not be true.  The author of that website concludes,

“The bottom line is that we just don’t know. As the above table shows, there is evidence on both sides of the debate. Just about the only thing we can say for certain is that, when he was younger, Equiano told people he was from Carolina, but when he was older, he told people he was from Africa. Whether you believe the younger Equiano or the older Equiano is entirely up to you…

Next I will show you a multimedia presentation of Olaudah’s description of life in Africa which consisted of images from my own time in Africa, other relevant images, maps, sound, and much more.

Now that you have seen your very first Presidential Inauguration what did you think? Not only was it your first, but it is probably one of the more important ones in recent history — our nation’s first African-American president!  For this first post you will begin working on it during Writing Skills with Ms. Kirsch and then finish on Friday during your blog period (second period) with Ms. Nickles and Ms. Kirsch. (I will be away at a convention that day and look forward to reading all you have to say!).

Please include links to some or all of these sites in your post to give your readers a chance to learn more about this historic day (you’ll learn how to add links on Friday!):

A Schedule of the Ceremony
President Obama’s Inaugural Address
Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem
Letters to the President Elect on Edinger House Blog
Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies
President Obama and Chief Justice Roberts Redo the Presidential Oath of Office