FIVE GARDENS AND GROWING

We are in the home stretch of the 2015 reading program - Friday we'll collect the week 4  numbers and see if we have made our goal.  It will be a stretch, but we are still accepting bonus submissions of recipes and poems, and they can make a difference - Send them to us!  They will also make a wonderful eBook of poetical deliciousness.  This morning I got this splendid poem in my email - reason enough to keep running reading programs for years to come!  All this and feeding people, too, in mind, body and soul.

The small piece of life

In the warmth of dark silt

Waiting for beams of sunlight

To wake the resting

A popping sprout

The plant of hope

That says "I am here"

The soothing rain

Bursting with energy and nutrients

The falling water wet on the rich soil

A strong stem that says "I will stay"

Reaches its roots out

Trusts the earth

And grows taller

   - Rebecca M. 5A

     I am writing from home, recovering from the flu.  The good news is, being sick gave me extra time for reading. I read Son by Lowis Lowry and I am about to finish Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan, which I have been reading little by little for a really long time.  In the very enjoyable chapter on bread making I came to this quote from Joe Vanderliet, the owner of Certified Foods and a miller for Community Grains that seemed to speak directly to this year's program - "What you have to understand..is that nature made a perfect package when it made the seed, all the parts working together in a living system." Your reading will earn you lots of "perfect packages" to grow and feed many people.  
      We've already received some great submissions for the Week 1 bonus, and we are looking forward to many more.  Here's a padlet wall where you can see the first few and the lovely Google  Doodle from yesterday.   Don't forget to cite your sources!  And have fun reading.   --elizabeth

SSFS Library Reading Program - READ, SEED, FEED

We launch on January 30th this year, and will be keeping track of  all Middle School and Lower School reading every day for 28 days. Directions and seeds will be coming home with students on Friday the 30th.   PK-2nd graders will bring home slips for recording their reading time, and 3rd-8th graders will record their minutes on a poster in their homeroom (LS) or their English classrooms (MS).  Every week there will be a way to earn a bonus hour that builds on the theme.  Every minute read will equal a seed that will go to grow a community garden.  Some of  the seeds will go to our own community farm, some will go to AFSC gardens in Logan, West Virginia that our US students and faculty helped  create and support on Intersession each year, and some will go to gardens identified by Seed Savers Exchange.  We  hope to reach 320,000 minutes/seeds and plant 8 gardens.  You can see our progress in the MS Collection space and the Tanglewood Library - and we'll post pictures here, too. 

Currently, we're looking for 2 liter soda bottles to make planters for every classroom to have a mini garden of micro-greens.  If you have any bottles bring them to either library.