Welcome back to school, Eagles! 2013-2014 = Best Year Yet!

VOTE AND WIN!

Tomorrow starts the voting period for the Follett Challenge! Please vote for FOREST NORTH: THE MOVIE once daily. Mrs. Fournier and Fournier's Friends will be organizing our efforts to vote on every single computer in our school once a day, but we need everyone to vote on their home computers as well!

Bookmark our FOREST NORTH: THE MOVIE homepage (http://smore.com/2cgk) with a convenient voting link to make it easy for you:

The voting has a huge reward- the votes, combined with the grades judges give us on our movie and the essays written by Mrs. Fournier & Ms. Fennewald, can earn us up to $60,000 to spend on our library and technology for classrooms! We would like to start an eBook collection, buy some playaways for students to checkout (they're like an iPod with one book already downloaded on it- so fun!), and buy many more books on .mp3 and even refresh our collection with old fashioned paper books, too! $60,000 can stretch a looooong way, so we're open for suggestions on other forms of technology we can buy for the classrooms too!

Forest North: The Movie! Filming 12/19

Bluebonnet Fun Night: Postcards From Camp

Thursday will mark our third BLUEBONNET FUN NIGHT this fall. We've already celebrated Under the Mambo Moon at Sommer in September, and Play, Louis, Play! at Jollyville in October. Tomorrow night, we will celebrate Postcards from Camp at the brand new England Elementary. We've been advertising this event on our morning announcements with a British accent in honor of England Elementary... and also because our anchor Jack just loves to speak with a British accent.

Postcards from Camp: a Postal Story, by Simms Taback, is an awesome interactive tale between a boy and his father. Michael isn't so sure about summer camp, but his dad keeps insisting he'll have fun. Will Michael start to like it? Either way, he and his dad send the coolest letters and postcards back and forth.

Simms Taback, winner of the Caldecott Award, even includes real envelopes for taking the letters in and out, and Michael even writes one scary campfire tale that's in an envelope. The scary book is my favorite part- it has an owl on the cover.

From Forest North, on Broadmeade Avenue, turn right onto the 45 frontage road for 1 mile. Turn left on Parmer. After 1.7 miles, take a right on Avery Ranch Road. After 1.5 miles, you'll turn right onto Pearson Ranch Road. England is at 8801 Pearson Ranch Road.

We'll meet at jolly old England Elementary in the Cafeteria at 6:00. I would recommend to park in the back for the quickest walk to the Cafeteria, which is also in the back of the school. England students will read this wonderful book to us, we'll learn some fun campfire songs, and eat delicious s'mores, the classic campfire treat!

All Forest North 3rd-5th graders who attend this event will receive 2 genuine Fournier bucks, which are pretend money with Mrs. Fournier's face on it. Each buck is worth one extra checkout! Check in with Mrs. Fournier at England to redeem your Fournier bucks!
See you there, Eagles!

Barnes & Noble Book Fair 12/1/12 10AM-10PM

If you haven't heard the news, the place to be this Saturday is our local Barnes & Noble! We're having our 2nd annual Book Fair on 12/1, from 10AM-10PM. Our Barnes & Noble is located right near Lakeline Mall at the Homestead Shopping Center. The address is 14010 U.S. 183, Austin, TX 78717.

Students are invited to shop with their families, because Barnes & Noble has agreed to donate 25% of all sales from FNE supporters back to our school. Last year we made over $3100 in the 12 hours we were there, which was three times as much as usually make with a book fair in the library, where we have to shut the library down for a week, make our own decorations, and cancel all lessons and checkout for 5 days.

Purchases made in the cafe (like the special Forest North vanilla coffee-free frappuccino, colored red or blue special for our Eagles!), holiday cheesecakes pre-ordered, books, Nooks and any other merchandise will apply towards our total. Every little bit helps!

We've got hours of fun entertainment planned for Eagles and their families. The key to our success last time was the involvement of our faculty, staff, students and their families. Here's our schedule of events:

10:00-10:00 Art Gallery featuring PreK-5th Student Work
10:00-10:00 Free Faculty Gift Wrap - get your teacher to wrap your holiday gifts!
12:00-1:00 Free Face Painting in the Children's Area
12:30-1:00 Kindergarten Flash Mob to "Ice Cream and Cake"
1:00 -1:30 Cup Stacking Tournament
1:30-2:00 Fourth Grade Poetry Slam
2:00-2:30 Jump “In” Eagles 3rd-5th Jump Rope Team Performance
2:30-3:00 Third Grade Comedy Show
3:00-3:30 Teacher Dog Parade- come pet your teacher's puppy!
3:30-4:00 First Grade Read Alouds
4:00-4:30 Jump “In” Eagles 1st-2nd Jump Rope Team Performance
4:30-5:00 Forest North Choir Sing Multicultural Holiday Music
5:00-5:30 Second Grade Holiday Book Commercials
5:30-6:00 Kindergarten Flash Mob to "Thriller"

Fournier's Friends, our special 3rd-5th student library volunteer crew, will be helping Mrs. Fournier work the front door. We will hold a sign that says "no donations required," and students will be asking patrons whether they're here to support Forest North. If they say "yes," we'll give them a sticker. All customers who are wearing a sticker get 25% of their purchase donated back to the FNE Library! All funds will be used to purchase new library books for our students, so we can all share the fruits of our labor!

Please email Mrs. Fournier if you have any ideas about how to make the Book Fair a success, if you would like to get involved, or if you need more information about the event. It's a great way for our community to have fun, show off our academic and extracurricular successes, and work together towards a common goal.

Thank you so much for your support. Here's hoping we have another successful Barnes & Noble Book Fair. See you on Saturday!

Multiplication Bee

Third grade was excited to show off their math skills in a Multiplication Bee right before we left for Thanksgiving break. All students were invited to compete one-on-one in a race to answer single digit multiplication problems up to 12x12. Students were encouraged to practice their facts and improve efficient strategies in problem solving ahead of time, and many students used a variety of different techniques to improve their efficiency at solving multiplication facts.

Students competed in a double-elimination bracket tournament style similar to the NCAA March Madness bracket. We kept the special names of the NCAA tournament to show our finalists. Here are 7 of our ELITE 8 CONTESTANTS! Congratulations to Ethan (not pictured), Bhavana, Ashwati, Cameron, Ryan, Dylan, Sebastian & Isaiah! They were cool under pressure as they multiplied their way through the competition.

After we got to the Elite 8, students competed another round to get to the Final 4. Here were our Final 4. At this point, the competition was so intense, the first student to answer was sometimes only a fraction of a second ahead of the other student. It was great to watch and set a great example for other students. Great work, Eagles. Our Final 4 were Bhavana, Ashwati, Cameron and Sebastian.

Our final two competitors left for the Championship round were Cameron and Ashwati. At this point, there were already murmurs in the crowd among students and teachers of a second bee this spring to try again for the championship. Cameron and Ashwati weren't intimidated- their quick math skills and mental repeated addition were ready for the challenge!

Our final champion was Ashwati. Ashwati, I was personally amazed at your dedication, and so proud of you. Your practice clearly paid off, and you prepared so well for this competition! Hard work is its own reward. Way to multiply! Ashwati will be defending her title later this spring against her grade level again. Other students will need to practice, practice, practice their strategies to get as efficient as Ashwati in solving these math problems as quickly as her. She's up to the challenge- it's going to be a great rematch. See you in the Spring, Eagles, and until then, keep multiplying!

First Grade Book Club

The Library is excited to announce 1st grade book club! A fantastic group of ten first graders, recommended by their teachers, come to the library twice a week to discuss our books. I'm amazed at how insightful these students are about their reading and how deep their connections, predictions, inferences, and observations are! Our first reading choice was Bink & Gollie by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee. We zoomed through our first title, and many of the participants already put the newly released sequel on hold. We loved comparing our two protagonists, learned new words like "bonanza" and "compromise" and discussed the choice of spot color in Tony Fucile.

Now, we've split into two groups, according to which book we were interested in, and are reading either Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie by Julie Sternberg and Ivy + Bean by Annie Barrows. We watched a short book trailer online to give us a preview of the books. We've got our special supplies ready- pencils, notebooks, sticky notes, and bookmarks to remind us of how we can categorize our thinking.

We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and students read their books between meetings, showing their thinking so they'll remember what they want to say when we meet next to talk about our books. Groups will change flexibly depending on what titles students are interested in reading. These ten students are deepening their understanding of literature, and their responses to it. Great job, first graders, and thank you to the first grade team for helping me help their students in the most meangingful way possible!