Sunday Chat

Hello students,

I went up to Adelante this afternoon to put away the Halloween decorations and had a nice conversation with Maestras Rita and Lisa. (If you saw me, you saw that I was walking slowly and had to sit down a lot.) They filled me in on how everyone was doing, and their plans for moving talking people around to new seats this week. The room looked well cared for, and I especially want to thank the janitors and gardeners for keeping things looking great! The recyclers have some work to do though.

I got an email back from the people who own the Yosemite web cams. They said they were going to be down for awhile yet, and didn’t know when they would be working. So…. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to have you start recording the water levels in the Merced River at Pohono bridge in Yosemite Valley. This tells how much water is running in the river, including all of the water from Yosemite Falls, Bridelveil Fall, and the Tenaya Creek. It will be fun to watch how fast the water rises after a storm. It’s measured in CFS, Cubic Feet of water per Second. One cubic foot contains about 7.5 gallons. One gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds. About how much does one cubic foot of water weigh?

I’ve spent a lot of my time reading when I haven’t been napping or walking around the neighborhood. I’ve put in a bunch of new online book reviews for you. For November, your book requirement is any book at your level (check with the teacher first!). You can use the Lexile numbers as a basic guide (click on the “What the Lexile numbers mean” tab at the bottom), or just see if there’s a book in the online database that you’ve read, look at its Lexile number, and go up or down from there if that book was too easy or hard for you.

Don’t forget that you can sort the database so that it’s meaningful to you. Just hover your cursor over the lettered column at the top that you want to sort by (example: by author, by Lexile number, or by Reviewer), click on the arrow that appears, and select choice “Sort Sheet A-Z” from the popdown menu that appears.

I’ve decided to now pay $50 per online book review in order to encourage more people to write reviews. If you have not yet been paid for doing a review, you are now eligible for the new amount. Be sure to put the Lexile in to get the full $50 (or prove to the teacher the book has no Lexile number!).

We now have 307 book reviews in the database. Let’s get some more in there from this year’s class!