Thankfulness

We often think about Thanksgiving as a time to gorge ourselves on vast quantities of scrumptious food, stare at hours of football, and travel too many hours on highways that are way too crowded. It can also be a great time to take stock of a year gone by.

Since last Thanksgiving my wife and I have welcomed a wonderful, charming, healthy daughter into our family, and that is the thing for which I am most thankful. I am learning to be more conscientious, more thoughtful, and more giving because now there is a person who depends in part on me for her survival in this cold world.

What has happened since last Thanksgiving that you are most thankful for?

Arguing or bickering?

One character posits that an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. In other words, a group of thoughts should work together in order to persuade somebody of something. However, bickering generally consists of just disagreeing with whatever another person says.

When you disagree with friends, classmates, siblings, parents, and teachers, do you tend to argue or bicker? How does that work out for you?

Another pandemic?

Click on the link above to learn about the effect of the Flu Epidemic of 1918 on upstate New York (and the world). Are you at all concerned that the Swine Flu will be as serious as the Spanish Flu was almost 90 years ago? Why or why not?

Make sure to use some specific details to support your opinions.

Disagree with me

Summer vacation is the biggest obstacle to having our students achieve their academic potential. Currently we have four ten-week quarters, which totals 200 school days. We should shift to a year-round school model, with only a two week break in early July. As a trade-off, we would not have school on Mondays. Fifty weeks with four school days per week would still give us 200 school days. Teachers, students, and administrators alike enjoy three day weekends - just imagine if every weekend was a three day weekend! I don't even think we would miss summer vacation all that much. Most of us are bored by the end of the break, and we are excited to get back to school to see our friends again.

Finally, with only a two-week break, students would forget less. Teachers could invest time in teaching lots of fun and exciting new things rather than boring the students by reviewing the things they had already "learned" but had forgotten over the summer.

In your comment, disagree with what I am saying above. Make sure to use as many good reasons as you can think of.

On what do you base your opinions?

Recently we celebrated Columbus Day. Many of the contemporaries of Christopher Columbus believed that the world was flat. We know today that they were wrong. However, many of them were basing their opinions on the best information available to them at the time.

Imagine being a young student in 1430. Everybody you know believes that the world is flat. Your parents believe that the world is flat. Your teachers believe that the world is flat. You can see with your eyes that the part of the earth where you live is flat. One day somebody tells you that the world is curved. How would you react? On what would you base your belief or disbelief?

Use good words to write better

1. The pig sat near the courthouse.

2. Cleverly disguised as a judge, the pig rested in the shade of a small maple in front of the courthouse.

3. Porky looked nervously around, wondering whether Fred the Farmer would recognize him in his costume and regretting choosing such a public place for his meeting with Chewy the Chicken.


All of the sentences above describe the picture. Which sentence do you like best? Why? Re-write sentence one to make it more descriptive. Feel free to add extra information that reveals more of the plot of the story (use sentence 3 as a guide).

Pig farm