Prairie School Buffalo Grove, Illinois
Greetings from Prairie School in Buffalo Grove, Illinois. We are named Prairie School because there is a prairie right next to our school. It is one of the few pieces of prairie left around here. Many years ago most of Illinois was prairie or forest before settlers came and changed the land by building farms and houses. The land our school is on was a prairie in the beginning then it became a tomato farm and then the farm was sold to create a neighborhood or subdivision with lots of houses and our school. The prairie is fun to explore and lots of grasshoppers are there in the late summer. Geese visit it on the way south in the fall and early winter. Right now it is covered with snow and all you can see is some dried up grasses. Our county is called Lake county because there are a lot of lakes around here. In the summer people like to take their boats out on the lakes. We have been having very cold weather the past few days. Our temperature graph has dipped down into the white for the first time. It was -1 at 9:00 yesterday. When it is really cold we always have a sunny day so at least it looks great when you look out the window. Our class is a multiage class. Our teacher is named Mrs. Emde. We have 26 children in our class. We have 13 first graders and 13 second graders. We do lots of fun projects. Right now we are studying dinosaurs. It is exciting. We like to have writing workshop and reading workshop. We have a big gym to have p.e. in. We have over 500 kids in our school. There are five first grades and two multiage classes and four second grade classes. One of our favorite authors is Marc Brown. We have been reading Arthur books for the past month. You can see him on the internet at www.pbs.org. It is fun to live near Chicago. Some kids in our class have been to the Bulls game and they have seen Michael Jordan play. We took a field trip to downtown Chicago in September. There are lots of tall buildings to see and Lake Michigan.