Farnsworth House Blog

Written by CS and AK

We recently interviewed Pamela Ness. She is a learning speacialist and a poet. She works at Dalton. She likes cats and knitting. She has two cats named Mimi an Elvira. She grew up in the suberbs of Boston, Massachussets. Before she came to Dalton she worked at a boys school called Fenn. She was a librarian at the school. She also taught social studies and language arts. She currently lives in a West Side apartment with her husband Paul. Ms. Ness loves to come to Farnsworth House to help with language arts and poetry. She really helps us with our work and when we were working on the immigration book project she helped us write and publish it. As you can see she is a really interesting person.

Remember that with your new privileges you also have new responsibilities. One of these privileges is the ability to email your teachers.

When you send an email to a teacher it is important to include the following:

• An appropriate greeting
• A correctly spelled and punctuated message that you have read over at least twice
• A polite sign-off
• Please do not use abbreviations, emoticons, or slang.
• Please do not use fancy colors or fonts.  They make your message hard to read and understand.
• This is your professional email.  Use it professionally.

Check your email everyday!!!  Assignments, at times, will be given through email!!!

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell
- A National Book Award Winner

Evie is a fifteen year old girl who lives in America. It is two years after WW II and her father has just come home. Her family takes a trip to Palm Beach where they meet an ex-GI Peter Colridge, who worked with her dad in Austria. She finds herself in an endless web of lies and recognizes them at a very slow pace. She soon realizes that everything she thought she knew about her family and Peter was a lie. How will she figure her way out of the mess? She’s only fifteen.

I thought this book was excellent. It is based on what can happen in real life. The story was intriguing and intelligent but also very serious. This book can take you to a world that you have never been to before. It shows you how life was back then and what situations you sometimes had to deal with. I recommend this book if you like mystery and romance.

-MR

I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You is by Ally Carter. The story is about a teenage spy at The Gallagher Academy. Her name is Cameron (Cammie the Chameleon) Morgan. People might claim that the school is for geniuses and snobs, but it’s actually a school for spies. At this school they learn how to hack, sneak, spy (of course), kill someone in seven different ways and speak fluently in fourteen different languages. Cammie is just trying to be something she can’t (normal). But one day on a mission she meets an ordinary boy who thinks she’s an ordinary girl. Of course she can hack into his computer, sneak into his house and take his DNA. But can she have a relationship with someone who can’t know about how she’s a spy?
At first I thought this book was really about spying and genius issues. But, it was really about how Cammie and Josh (the normal boy) keep their relationship. I think this is for girls ages 10 and up. I think it’s for these ages because it has some material in it that has to do with relationships and issues that an average 7 or 8 year old might not understand. To tell you the truth most kids who are under 11 have read this book. My friend HL told me about this book. We have the pretty much the same tastes in books. So I tried it out. Before I read this book my mom couldn’t get me to read it. But, once I started it, my mom couldn’t get me to put it down.
Ally Carter has a talent for telling about realistic characters at their age. For example Cammie acts like how any teenage girl would. She likes boys, she thinks her mom is totally embarrassing and she has outfit crises. I thought this book was very engrossing. I loved this book. I am the type of girl who likes books with romance, adventure and humor. This book has all of those things. If you’re that type of girl then you’ll love this book too.

-DB