Chocolate Lily Celebrations!

Hello everyone:)

Thank you to all our bloggers and book reviews this past month.  We enjoyed sharing and reading your thoughts and opinion on the two past reads Hunter and Racing Home!  I was delighted to see some of the excellent writing developing amongst our bloggers, as they learn how to capture the attention of a reader and make them want to read more. To read the blog reviews go to this page here.  Congratulations to Angus and Bekah for winning book reviewing prizes this month!

 I am also thrilled at the level of open ended questions that encourage collaboration on Blackboard.  Our students are all becoming excellent moderators and worthy of teacher status!  Congratulations to Melody for getting a good conversation going on Hunter.

Winning students please share with me your email address so I can send your prizes?

If you still have a book review or comment to add to our HCS NDG Blog please go on and encourage your friends or share your opinions on this page here.  Alternately you can share your review in word document and I will add to the blogs.

Sadly we are on to our last leg of Book club for this term :)



I have ordered some of the CHOCOLATE LILY selection in our e library, and we have double copies of the books in our physical commons. The books in our e library include Maggies Chopsticks and Big City Bees.  You can order the other physical copies via Canpar and our catalogue at L4U.  So with that in place I am happy to announce the next stage of our learning...

We will have one more meeting to discuss the winner of the Chocolate Lily books in late May as well as our author read earlier on May 7th, where we hope to encourage all book club participation.  But in the meantime I encourage you to take out the books and share your review on the HCS NDG blog or share with me and I will post.  I will let you know more re our meeting date as we connect with our campus library students and other book clubs.

We are very excited to have famous Canadian authoress April Dueck come and share her writing gifts with the Red Cedar nominated book Racing Home on May 7th at 1.45 pm.  It is going to be a tough choice to decide the winner of the Red Cedar nominees, but I think my votes are for Catboy and Racing Home.  How about you?

Blessings and Happy Valentines Day!
Pippa Davies

February Meeting

Thanks for joining in our recent Christmas party, and sharing more about Catboy, your Christmas traditions and awesome art work on the white board!  :)

Gabrielle has blogged about the book on this post here on the NDG blog.  Please can you go on and comment what you liked about the book beneath her post?  I hope this starts more collaboration on the blog and will encourage others to start blogging!  :)  I would love to see you all writing a review or commenting on someone else's review to win the next prizes in book club please?  Just let me know if you or your parent would like to be invited and I will add your name as an author on the blog.  This is a wonderful way to learn how to write with voice, for a given audience.  Sharing about literacy is all part of being a book club member:D 

Our next meeting is February 5th, 2014.  Here is the link:

https://ca-sas.bbcollab.com/m.jnlp?sid=7345&password=M.568104B2445CE814E329303C879EFD

Hopefully that will give us all time to read the next books.     We are reading  Hunter! by Eric Walters  It shares the same story,  but from the cat's viewpoint.  If you cannot get a copy of the book we are also reading Racing Home, available on our e library here  which is on the Red Cedar book awards list.  This is an amazing read and I highly recommend!  Let me know if you are reading this book and I will order more copies for the e library.

This session will be our last novel that we read, but please note you do not have to read both books.  Only if you have time:)  Please feel free to share book reviews with me as you go and I will help you edit and submit to the blog if you want to share!  The next part of book club in the spring is sharing on picture books.  More to come soon!

Our winners for today's prizes were Gabrielle for her book review and Bekah and Angus for initiating discussions.  Way to go!  You will be receiving your Amazon gift vouchers soon via email.

 Blessings on your weekend and I look forward to seeing you on the blog :D