A Day at School: Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Today I got to know some of the girls at SGS and attended several interesting classes. The 8th graders invited me to join them in "Reading Workshop" - an independent reading program that Grandma Sally facilitates. We each chose titles that particularly interest us and were allowed the luxury of reading for a full 90-uninterrupted-minutes! Heavenly! I particularly enjoyed perusing Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's Playing With Boys...which is something that doesn't happen that often at Seattle Girls' School...playing with boys, that is!

After lunch I checked out the 6th grade's art work for their Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration. More than 500 years ago, when the Spanish Conquistadors landed in what is now Mexico, they encountered natives practicing a ritual that seemed to mock death. A ritual known today as Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. The ritual is celebrated in Mexico and certain parts of the United States with a large Mexican-American population. Although the ritual has since been merged with Catholic theology, it still maintains the basic principles of the Aztec ritual, such as the use of skulls. Today, people don wooden skull masks called calacas and dance in honor of their deceased relatives. The wooden skulls are also placed on altars that are dedicated to the dead. The 6th grade skeltons were almost as colorful as my newly designed outfit! I also admired the 6th grades inventions that they envisioned for their first term's culmination entitled "Invention Convention." I'm pretty sure that their "Please do not touch" sign didn't really apply to me! Right?

Before leaving for the day, my new 8th grade friend, Janee' Bash, introduced me to the school pets, pigmy pot-bellied goats Sojo and Mojo and a couple of their chicken pals. They reminded me that Ryan had visited during his Thanksgiving visit of 2008...and they wanted to make sure that I expressed their regrets to him for having butted him off the step in their pen! They were only kidding...really! Goats KIDDING...get it??