Fifth Grade SSR (Sustained Silent Reading)

"My favourite task was to hand out the books at the beginning of term.
Those children all had new books,
whose turning pages wafted a fragrance of sun on sweet wood;
a scent of knowledge."
~ Andrea Levy ~
(scroll down / or click "Our Island Home")

My son Sam with his 5th grade classmates, twins Michael & Geoffrey
in Mr. Goldberg's Room, St. Peter's School Philadelphia, 2004
"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thence-forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood." ~Robert Louis Stevenson

Above photo, courtesy of Lyle Goldberg, pictured here with Sam
(I took this one)

A favorite topic in Mr. G's class:

Back to School
"It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated." ~Edith Hamilton