Music and Math

Today students began the day by taking part of a pretest for the Blast Off program. I am not much of a fan of test preparation programs, but I like Blast Off because it teaches critical thinking and reading skills more than simple "test-taking" skills. I think it helps them become better readers, not just score higher on the CAT 6. Still, even a good program like Blast Off can be dull in spots, so we like to pretest the students to know which areas we can possibly skip because they already have the skills. We also took our first spelling test today, and you can check on the results on our on-line gradebook. If you are not already set up to look at your child's scores, please send me an email and I will send you a password.

After recess, we continued looking at "Stevie", our third Open Court story. We did our blending and dictation, and we used tableau to review our vocabulary words. We had already read the story yesterday, so today we just used the story as a springboard to developing critical reading skills. Today we worked on the skill Open Court calls "Drawing Conclusions". This is what most teachers and parents call making inferences. It is a hard skill for third graders. The third-grade mind is a little uncomfortable with questions which do not have one absolute and final answer. They also do not like being asked to support their inferences with textual citations. But, even though it's hard for them, with lots of practice they can become good critical readers. We started to do that today.

After lunch and PE, we worked more on rhythm. There are a lot of connections between music and math, and rhythm is where those connections are the most obvious. We have been working on the concept of steady beat and have learned how those beats are combined into measures and can also be subdivided into subbeats. (We have not yet introduced terms such as quarter and eighth notes.) This is actually developing a foundation for division and for fractions.

Today, we took a silly children's rhyme "Fudge, Fudge, Call the Judge" and we identified the underlying rhythmic pattern. Students then worked in small groups to express this rhythm in body percussion instead of in words. They shared their performances with the whole class. We concluded by having several groups substitute unpitched percussion instruments for the words to express the rhythm.

Homework: No homework this weekend. If students know they have unfinished work at home, they are more than welcome, of course, to work on that this weekend. Otherwise, enjoy these last days of summer.